Göksu Kunak
REMAINS

1 MAY until 28 JUN 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-10 pm

Performances:
2 MAY at 2 pm THE VOID
23 MAY time tba DRAWINGS
13 JUN time tba CIRCLES
14 JUN time tba Screening and Talk
20 JUN at 8 pm DELIRIUM

REMAINS begins with an empty space. Drawing inspiration from the temporal exhibition format explored by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in his 1991 project Every Week There Is Something Different, where the exhibition itself unfolded as a sequence of changes over the course of a month, the exhibition approaches time as a primary material. Rather than presenting a fixed arrangement of works, REMAINS unfolds as a temporal structure in which actions, gestures, smells and bodies gradually transform the iconic bunker space of EBENSPERGER.

Using the immateriality and ephemerality of performance as its primary engine, the exhibition explores how immaterial forces—gesture, sound, tension, exhaustion, and collective movement—condense into matter. Bodybuilders, karate and grappling practitioners, a pole dancer, suspended performer, and growler activate the space through prolonged physical actions, accompanied by fragments of text that reverberate through the space. These bodies function as kinetic instruments that generate the exhibition”s paintings and drawings: pigment transferred through contact, movement traced through repetition, surfaces marked by strain and gravity.

In REMAINS art history operates as points of departure. The exhibition acknowledges genealogies emerging from artists whose practices address presence, disappearance, memory, and the politics of (in)visibility. In parallel, REMAINS enters into dialogue with immaterial monochromes and performative gestures; kinetic painting and corporeal inscription; entropic architectures, and absurdity. The exhibition also resonates with the notion of the ! indefinable” described by Eugène Delacroix—a force in art that cannot be reduced to subject or explanation but is felt as atmosphere and vibration.

Performance is often understood as immaterial and fleeting. Who is allowed to leave a trace, exist and who is destined to disappear anyways? As we all know, bodies, gestures, and voices may be deleted, (wrongly) archived, or made to appear as if they never were there from the beginning. REMAINS reflects on the longstanding question of how immaterial practices circulate within systems of display and exchange. Performance has long been subject to the expectation that it produces sellable objects or stable artifacts, and performers themselves are often caught within ongoing debates—and occasional mockery—over whether such work should generate collectible forms at all. Rather than resolving this tension, the exhibition exposes it. What remains is not the event itself but the pressure it exerted on space; or say, what exists on the canvas is an event.

Working across performance, and installation Göksu Kunak constructs environments in which bodies, images, and architectural space enter unstable relationships. Muscular bodies sustain prolonged contractions, pole dancers generate circular time, and climbers ascend walls, testing gravity and endurance. These elements form hyperassemblages that move between black box and white cube, staging tensions between spectacle and critique, visibility and concealment.