BADEN-BADEN.- With Let Your Rain Fall (Kendi Yağmurunu Yağdırmak) the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is presenting the biggest solo exhibition in Germany to date by the artist Mehtap Baydu (b. 1972, Bingöl). The exhibition unites recent and earlier works into a spatial choreography of performance, sculpture, textiles, photography, and video. At its heart is Baydu’s performative and poetic inquiry into bodies, rituals, gender roles, and cultural ascriptions over many years.

The Turkish title Kendi Yağmurunu Yağdırmak, which can be translated as “Let your rain fall”, refers to the creative act of bringing something forth from within oneself—beyond all expectations. The rain brought down by Baydu in her exhibition doesn’t fall from the sky, but results from an act of calm self-empowerment and reflection on identity, self-positioning, closeness, and distance.

Baydu’s artistic output is influenced by performance and by the body as a bearer of cultural meanings, social ascriptions, and hidden resilience. Her work goes beyond predefined role models, appropriates apparently “male” attitudes, breaks open traditionally “female” attributions, and deconstructs social expectations through staging, exchange of roles, unveiled physicality, and self-disguise.

The exhibition Let Your Rain Fall (Kendi Yağmurunu Yağdırmak) is an invitation from the artist to set identities and cultural boundaries in motion through forms of self-empowerment. It dispenses with narrative in favor of an open structure in which artistic, biographical, political, and cultural strands can coexist. Baydu’s work refuses clear-cut answers, seeking rather to ask questions about origin, belonging, body politics, and the transformative potential of the self. At times of increasingly polarized political and social discourse her work is a reminder that self-empowerment can grow quietly from within oneself.

Egemen Demirci: TEXT MATERIAL

For his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Egemen Demirci (b. 1983, Izmir) undertakes a structural analysis of the exhibition space through the modification and reconfiguration of his works. His practice aims to explore how and where we read and interpret art, and how this process, in turn, shapes the artwork itself.

The works presented at various sites in and around the building are connected by a shared artistic strategy: examining the conditions of exhibition and the contextual frameworks that influence how artworks are perceived. Existing pieces undergo a process of re-materialization—either through the abstraction of their elements and texts or by the integration of new components that alter the performative nature of text as artwork. In doing so, Demirci emphasizes the interplay and tension between meaning, language, materiality, and space.

His video installation also undergoes a shift in medium—from digital to analogue—referencing self-indication and self-archiving. These aspects are central both to the reconfiguration of the artworks and to a broader critique of the institutional parameters within which art is displayed, mediated, and situated.

Over the past decade, Demirci has increasingly focused on the use of text in his artistic production. Through this medium, he interrogates notions of authorship and identity in post-conceptual, contemporary, and institutional contexts, while proposing alternative modalities of universality and futurity. A significant portion of his practice takes place in public space, where he explores the limitations and transformative potential of public text. His installations create ambiguities and contradictions that challenge spatial norms and problematize the idea of access—often confronting the viewer with the presence of the unfamiliar or alien within the familiar.

On invitation of the former directors of Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yıldız, Mehtap Baydu and Egemen Demirci have been associated with the Kunsthalle for many years. They have repeatedly engaged with the specific context of Baden-Baden in their respective artistic practices – with the history of institutions, the city’s various communities, or questions of public space. Numerous artistic impulses have arisen from these longstanding connections, which now echo in the two exhibitions.

Curators Mehtap Baydu: Sandeep Sodhi, Christina Lehnert and Çağla Ilk
Curator Egemen Demirci: Christina Lehnert
Curatorial assistant: Dr. Lisa Steib