LUCCA × PİLEVNELİ PRESENT
:MENTALKLINIK — ALMOST SURPRISED
18–28 SEPTEMBER 2025
LUCCA, BEBEK – ISTANBUL
As the Istanbul Biennial kicks off, artist duo :mentalKLINIK takes over Lucca—Bebek’s iconic social landmark—for a ten-day conceptual intervention. Supported by PILEVNELI, this unprecedented collaboration brings artist duo :mentalKLINIK into Lucca for the venue’s first-ever full-scale conceptual takeover. Following their performative occupation of Markiz Patisserie, where the historic café was reframed as a stage, :mentalKLINIK now pushes further—rewiring Lucca’s atmosphere and sensory codes.
In this encounter, Lucca opens itself not as backdrop but as material, reshaped and reprogrammed by the artist duo. The space is submerged into a flow saturated with the cultural residues of like–share–follow behavior. Through seductive visuals and oxymoronic gestures, the artists lure the viewer into the spectacle.
Almost Surprised captures the slippery instant between the pleasure of visibility and the discomfort of becoming content. It codes itself into the textures of curatorial leisure, infiltrating the atmosphere of Lucca and reprogramming the familiar. What looks intact is already altered.
With this gesture, :mentalKLINIK deploys a precise, high-gloss, clinically alluring aesthetic sabotage. The duo doesn’t reject the spectacle—they hypercharge it. Lucca turns into a physical social feed: ambient glamour, algorithmic desire, and performative habits are rendered spatial. Scrolling becomes architectural. Atmosphere becomes code. There’s no stage—because everyone is already performing. Laugh. Post. Stay in the loop.
At the core of Almost Surprised lies :mentalKLINIK’s persistent interrogation of the aesthetics of hyper-now. They construct emotionally encrypted worlds—interfaces that spawn unfamiliar feelings, seductive detours, and new behavior codes. Echoing Robert Filliou’s proposition that “art is what makes life more interesting than art,” they don’t blur art and life—they expose how the two have already merged into a seamless spectacle.
In the Almost Surprised atmosphere, art doesn’t intervene—it hijacks. What’s already aestheticized is seized. The everyday is revealed as broadcast: gamified, coded, and optimized for feedback. As Lucca celebrates its third decade, this marks a signal moment—capturing the split-second when atmosphere becomes interface and even surprise becomes suspicious.
Art doesn’t ask permission. It arrives uninvited—just in time.
This isn’t a surprise.
It’s Almost Surprised.
About :mentalKLINIK
:mentalKLINIK is a Brussels-based artist duo from Istanbul, founded in 1998 by Yasemin Baydar and Birol Demir. Operating as a multimedia and conceptual laboratory—where “:mental” stands for thought and “KLINIK” signifies action—they merge their individual identities to create a distinct third persona. They stride with undisguised dexterity through invisible political strategies and social dynamics by ultra-contemporary devices of an apparent lightness. Like a disco ball, :mentalKLINIK shows are a selection of their multifaceted universe. Resisting the limitations of a single vocabulary or style, their world is playful and full of hedonistic appeal—festive and glamorous but also revealing, on closer view, an underlying violence suggestive of a bad trip after a party or a creepy beginning of the end.