:mentalKLINIK - LUNATIC POETS: PİLEVNELİ | DOLAPDERE

LUNATIC POETS
:mentalKLINIK
18 September – 18 October 2025
PILEVNELI, Istanbul
A Digital Human Ensemble, a Meta-Cinematic Trap, a Contemporary-Poetic Collapse

PILEVNELI is pleased to present the debut of LUNATIC POETS, a solo exhibition by the
Brussels-based artist duo :mentalKLINIK, the outcome of four years of production. Unfolding digital and physical planes simultaneously, the exhibition invites visitors into a double-layered performative reality—on one side sculptures, spatial installations, and robotic artworks; on the other, a meta-cinematic installation inhabited by synthetic prophets.

 

In this exhibition, the artist duo unleashes the excess of contemporary human as a hyper-

charged ecosystem — as if hacking into an algorithm caught in an endless loop, mid-panic attack, inside a nightclub. Painfully hilarious and uncanny, this universe transmits a shameless consciousness directly. In a time when bodies have lost their authority, and at the brink of exhaustion, these post-body beings—exiled from the analog world and forged from data mud—are neither AI products nor avatars, but the three performers of the Digital Human Ensemble created by :mentalKLINIK in Unreal Engine 5. The only inherited knowledge they possess is Lunatic Poems—a decade-long writing process by the duo, composed not as literary narrative but as synthetic expressions of collapse: affective spam, libidinal syntax, synthetic gossip, and extra-lexical melancholia. Woven from algorithmic murmurs, influencer breakdowns, therapy echoes, philosophical spasms, and techno-fetish dismay, this archive of contemporary delirium forms the Digital Humans’ memory.

 

Post-body beings that spill beyond the binary regimes of domination activate the exhibition’s meta-cinematic core. Performances by Jeanna Cristiello (Thea), Martha Gardner (Viola), and Nick Roland (Nyx), recorded with motion capture technology, have been choreographed under the dramaturgy of Aida Gabriëls and shaped from :mentalKLINIK’s hyper-emotional attitude archive. Their performances and vocal expressions are fully embodied by MetaHumans, each transformed into a human-origin synthetic entity. LUNATIC POETS draws inspiration from the Anatolian archetype of the meczup—a nonconforming bearer of wisdom—turning madness into syntax and resistance inside :mentalKLINIK’s deserted party atmosphere, and challenging Western philosophy’s obsession with diagnosing and domesticating mental illness.

 

The exhibition opens as a microclimate built upon two parallel planes. The digital plane is a video work constructed in Unreal Engine 5, assembled like a virtual film set with elements ranging from MetaHumans to cinematic lighting and spatial effects. This digital universe brings together sculptures, installations, and assets from the duo’s broader practice. Within this meta-structure, loaded with moods, materials, and protocols, LUNATIC POETS remains suspended in unending hysteria, in a state of meta cinematic collapse.

 

The physical exhibition at PILEVNELI opens with "Every Now"—a dysfunctional duo-clock

sculpture staged at the exhibition’s entrance, operating to the broken rhythm of contemporary time and embodying the techno-trauma of existence. The gallery space is clad in a reflective, wounded membrane that holds analog and digital worlds in a fragile tension. Inside this shell, the human-form sculptures MICA and GREY circulate as post-body human-robots, positioned on heavy-duty pedestal robots programmed with internal behavioral protocols. At the same time, the meta-cinematic work of LUNATIC POETS spreads throughout the entire space, establishing an uninterrupted vibration between physical and digital existences.

 

LUNATIC POETS is not a vision of the future—it is the present rendered illegible.