Can Yıldırım & Lalin Mercan — Superanxiety : Nexium, 2026

Superanxiety became, for Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan, the name of a diffuse anxiety capable of contaminating perception and the environment. With Superanxiety: Nexium – a reference to the medication that protects the body from its own acidity – the artists explore the desire to contain a state that ultimately escapes all regulation. The installation connects an immersive passage evoking the inside of a body, a room inspired by an Apollo Program emergency shelter, and, at its centre, a bar conceived as a place for pause and listening. Each space overturns its original function: the refuge becomes unstable and respite becomes contaminated. On the walls, the drawings superimpose fictional futures and bodily fragments until they become omens. The cockroach, whose upturned legs emerge from the bar, extends this ambiguity. Associated with fantasies of survival and resistance, it becomes a symbol of irreducible fragility, revealing the failure of narratives that promise protection from collapse.

Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan develop complementary practices centred on storytelling, images, and signs. Can Yıldırım explores the contemporary saturation of images and texts, bringing forth moments of rupture and intensity from fragments. Through drawing, installation, and sculpture, Lalin Mercan constructs hybrid narratives shaped by mythological, feminist, and autobiographical references. Working together, they create open-ended narrative forms in which images, objects, and stories become spaces for the reconfiguration of meaning.