Loving You Is So Hard!

This publication, which accompanies Mehtap Baydu’s solo exhibition Loving You Is So Hard! at Arter, aims at offering a comprehensive overview of the artist’s practice. Comprising Baydu’s performance, installation, photography, and video works from various periods, the book opens with a letter by Selen Ansen, curator of the exhibition, addressed to Mehtap Baydu. It also features an essay by curator and art historian Sandeep Sodhi, entitled “When The Peacock Dances Before The Rain”, which explores the artist’s practice; a poem by poet and writer Anita Sezgener, titled “24 Vertebral Pointillism”, inspired by Baydu’s works; and an essay by philosopher and academic Emre Şan, “The Distance Between My Body and Everything Else”, focusing on the artist’s work The Distance Between Me and Everything Else (a Body in Glass). The publication also features an English translation and a transcription in the original language of a conversation conducted by Mehtap Baydu with her mother in the Bingöl dialect of Zazaki. Designed by Ayşe Bozkurt, the book features the essays alongside reproduction photographs by Hadiye Cangökçe, exhibition views by Kayhan Kaygusuz, and images by Fırat Rüzgar documenting the installation and production processes.
Mehtap Baydu’s solo exhibition Loving You Is So Hard!, taking place in Arter’s first-floor gallery space between 29 April and 15 November 2026, echoes the distance and the tension often intrinsic to desire with the promise of absolute proximity and a sense of implied absence that characterise the process of moulding central to Baydu’s practice. Engaging the will and fragility inherent in life, the presented works materialise an inclusive and collective body that is continuously shaped by the artist through multiplication, fragmentation, imprinting and overlapping. The exhibition’s spatial orchestration manifests the temporal and material plurality of each work by bringing together a selection of pieces produced in a range of materials and textures, including ceramics, bronze, fabric, paper, and glass, alongside the documentation and performative traces that surround these productions. Foregrounding a multifaceted artistic practice in which performance extends into objecthood, and the object fosters performative potentials, this spatial arrangement invites visitors to experience Baydu’s works through the concepts of in-betweenness, transformation and otherness.