As Uranus completes its transit into Gemini this April, marking the end of an eight-year cycle of upheaval and the birth of new beginnings, Munich-based artist Gülbin Ünlü prepares for her Berlin debut at Galerie Barbara Thumm. Currently a fellow at Villa Romana in Florence, the artist of Turkish roots arrives in the German cultural capital to present a highly curated conversation between her institutional exhibition history and her most recent experimental frontiers. Her title proposes a cognitive space for self-recognition; it is almost an ice-breaker motto for self-introduction: a clever play on words when one considers the meaning of her surname in Turkish: “celebrity, famous, well-known…”
Ünlü’s complex and unique practice is defined by a signature „mash-up“ philosophy: a seamless dialogue between painting, drawing, photography, and sound. Rather than adhering to a single medium, she employs a multi-layered hybrid technique that blends printmaking and painting into fragmented dimensions and structures. This open approach functions as a form of autonomy, utilizing „sampling“ and „remixing“ to challenge standard regimes of visibility and explore hidden, affective, and deeper narratives. Her ability to bridge the gap between classical technique and raw, modern expression has garnered international acclaim, with recent presentations at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Haus der Kunst, and Berlinische Galerie.
The heartbeat of the exhibition is a site-specific evolution of her installation “Karanlık Işık” (2024). Originally manifested at a ready-made venue within the group exhibition “Carrying the Earth to the Sky” during Various Others 2024 in Munich, it now merges with the transparent elements from her solo exhibition “Fragmentornament” (2025) at the Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe. This hanging tower is light within its materiality; a fluid and volatile body. Built on a „remake, remix, or revisit“ for the gallery space, the work utilizes sublimation printing on flag fabric (Fahnenstoff), weaving together ten fabric elements from “Karanlık Işık” with the diaphanous layers of the “Fragments.”
A linguistic oxymoron in both Turkish and English, “Karanlık Işık” [Dark Light] reimagines subliminal levels of locating the self in psychogeographic landscapes: Could we separate darkness from light? While the environmental economy tests whether recycling or upcycling is viable, this monumental vertical tower reaches nearly six meters, inviting a 360-degree viewing experience. By stacking these transparent textiles, Ünlü moves away from object-centered staging toward a spatial experience where the viewer’s movement and ways of relating to the work become an immaterial component of the work. Just as the hanging tower requires a 360-degree viewing experience to be understood, the AI contributions require a multidimensional reading: they are at once high-tech and hauntingly ancestral.
Beyond digital novelty, Ünlü organically engages with Artificial Intelligence as an extension of artistic thinking, echoing a Fosterian „Archival Impulse.“ In her „Speculative Archive,“ the AI functions as a non-human witness, synthesizing historical data into fictional documentary sequences. This isn’t mere automation; it is a collaborative haunting. By prompting the machine to visualize her grandmother’s village, she uses the AI’s inherent strangeness to manifest the sci-fi element of the landing alien. Her methodology is committed to researching archival foundations to generate speculative narratives with new forms of image-making. In a jarring intervention, Ünlü generated 1930s-style photography of her grandmother’s village, disrupted by a surreal, sci-fi element: an alien is landing considering the word is also commonly used for someone who is not from (t)here…
An archive of things that never were, but always felt. AI acts as a digital clairvoyant, a synthetic medium that reconstructs a past it never witnessed. Which specific alien are you going for: the space-traveling kind or the social outsider? Stranger, foreigner, undocumented, visitor, or the celestial? These undigested images blend personal heritage and family trees with speculative fiction, questioning the reliability of the photographic record, self-definition, and self-perception. In two pieces from her “Transit” series (Transit: Unlocked, Transit: Unheard), ink, oil, and even glitter blur the superimposition of the private and the political. By utilizing AI to generate these fictional documentaries, Ünlü achieves a digital V-Effekt. Just as Brecht used theater to prevent the audience from losing themselves in the narrative, the AI-generated glitch, or alien figure prevents the viewer from consuming the family history as mere nostalgia. It forces a pause: Is this a memory, reoccurring trauma, or a calculation?
Forcing a collision between authentic heritage and algorithmic hallucination, the AI’s errors and outputs inspire sci-fi interventions. Both Turkey and Germany have strong localities with unwritten histories of military, war, violence, genocide and stories of muted communities within isolated villages; this visual manifestation of the displacement inherent in the immigrant experience resonates with contextual relevance.
UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, referring to any aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified. There is no better place than Berlin for this „almost famous“ artist’s debut. Gülbin Ünlü’s first solo exhibition, „Almost ÜNLÜ,“ considers not only the ghosts of the capital, the shadows of the Cold War, Post-War, and Post-Truth, but also the „aliens and alienations“ of a city where icons like Füruzan, Klaus Nomi, David Bowie, and Grace Jones once walked with the wind in their heads.
Text: Misal Adnan Yıldız
