Reality Show: Mutlu Aksu
Overview
Reality Show, Mutlu Aksu
A “reality show” is defined as a format in which real people’s real lives are presented in front of the camera. But when we watch a reality show, are we truly witnessing reality itself? Once the cameras are set, the lights adjusted, and the footage edited, can what appears on the screen still be considered real? When we reach for our phones each morning, reviewing, framing, and editing images before sharing them, to what extent can we speak of the reality of what we see? More importantly, how does what we call real life differ from a reality show?
 
Mutlu Aksu’s exhibition Reality Show, presented at Galeri 77, emerges precisely from within these questions. The artist turns his attention to the ordinary moments of everyday life, familiar objects, recognizable spaces, and the roles assigned to individuals by social structures. While making visible the power relations and symbols operating beneath this surface, he focuses on how individuals experience and, often unconsciously, internalize them. In doing so, he constructs a carefully staged visual narrative that distances itself from any claim to documentary representation.
 
To understand the visual world constructed in Reality Show, one must look back from the present. The intellectual ground that nourishes Aksu’s practice extends to a period before the emergence of social media and the internet, yet one that laid the foundation for today’s visual regime. The questions posed by the artist are not new; however, it is evident that they are felt more acutely than ever before.
 
In the mid 20th century, the world was undergoing one of the greatest transformations in the history of communication. Radio reached millions simultaneously, cinema transported audiences into entirely different worlds, and television, for the first time, placed a screen within the domestic sphere, at the very center of family life. Mass consumption culture was on the rise, advertising was selling not just products but lifestyles, and images were circulating faster and more widely than ever before. This transformation led many thinkers to ask new questions: How do these media reshape human beings? Where does reality stand in a world saturated with images? One of the most enduring responses came in 1967 from Guy Debord, who argued that in modern capitalist society, life is no longer directly lived but experienced as an immense accumulation of representations, a condition he termed the spectacle.
 
For Debord, the spectacle was something far more fundamental than illusion or deception; it was a system of representations through which power rendered itself invisible, embedding social and political structures within the fabric of everyday life. Individuals no longer lived but watched, no longer experienced but observed, no longer participated but consumed. This transformation was not imposed by force but operated as a voluntary, even desired process. By rendering individuals passive and turning them into spectators of their own lives, the spectacle presented power relations as natural, even inevitable.
 
In 1981, Jean Baudrillard pushed this discussion further. By the time Simulacra and Simulation was published, consumer society had matured, media had permeated all
aspects of daily life, and image production had reached a dizzying pace. In such a world, what remains when a copy replaces the original? If people consume representations instead of real experiences, do they eventually begin to experience those representations as reality? Baudrillard addressed this process through the concept of the simulacrum not a copy of the real, but an image that produces its own reality without any reference to an original. He described this transformation in four stages: first as a reflection of reality, then as a representation that masks it, then as an image that conceals the absence of reality, and finally as a pure simulacrum with no relation to reality whatsoever. At this final stage, there is neither original nor copy only signs and the reality they produce. Baudrillard termed this condition hyperreality: a mode of experience that appears more intense, more vivid, and more complete than reality itself.
 
More than half a century has passed since Debord formulated his thesis of the spectacle. When Baudrillard developed his theory of simulation, the internet did not yet exist; mobile phones and social media, in their current forms, were unimaginable. Yet these theories have not lost their relevance. On the contrary, many of the dynamics they identified have become even more visible within digital culture. Today, we begin our days by looking at screens, move through a continuous flow of images, and often end our days in front of them. Most of these images appear ordinary and it is precisely this ordinariness that reveals how the spectacle operates today. Power no longer functions solely through grand narratives but also through small, everyday scenes embedded in the visual flow of daily life.
 
Contemporary visual culture has become a field of representation operating at an unprecedented speed of production and consumption. Social media platforms, among its primary producers, are not merely tools of communication but structural environments in which social norms, power relations, and acceptable forms of identity are constantly reproduced. The defining feature of this environment is that control is not imposed externally but internalized. Individuals learn what is worth sharing, what appears beautiful, and what looks successful through the platform’s invisible reward mechanisms, and they voluntarily reproduce these learned norms. Likes, view counts, and algorithmic visibility create a selective pressure that determines what continues to exist. In this system where exploitation is enacted not from the outside but from within, not by another but by the individual’s own hand power reaches its most refined and invisible form.
 
The aesthetic language of this visual culture is not accidental. Smooth surfaces, warm tones, orderly compositions, and above all, images of harmony and happiness constitute the dominant visual norms of these platforms. Through these norms, it is silently coded which bodies, spaces, relationships, and emotions are deemed worthy of visibility. Transparency is presented as a value of freedom; yet it entails the disappearance of privacy, shadow, and ambiguity. Everything must be visible, shareable, consumable. What remains unseen is treated as non-existent, and what is deemed non-existent is excluded from public existence. Even emotions must conform to this framework: pain, vulnerability, and anger can only become visible when rendered into a consumable aesthetic form. Experiences that cannot take this form remain outside visual culture and therefore outside the public sphere.
 
Mutlu Aksu’s works emerge from within this very visual culture, consciously employing its language and objects. For the artist, the starting point is often a personal impression: an image glimpsed on social media, a scene encountered on the street, an internalized
tension. Yet this personal beginning transforms into a social question on the canvas. What ultimately concerns Aksu is how mechanisms of pressure and domination within everyday life relate to reality, identity, and representation and why this relationship appears so ordinary.
 
Aksu’s production process unfolds across two layers. The first is conceptual and observational: the artist thinks, observes, and accumulates over extended periods. Once these thoughts reach a certain intensity, he moves into the sketching phase. The sketch functions as a structure that concretizes the abstract, outlining the composition without delving into detail. Aksu does not treat this stage as a one-time decision but as a process he repeatedly revisits, testing different scenarios. Reaching the final composition often requires passing through multiple, divergent sketches. The second layer is entirely visual and intuitive: a stage where observation recedes, and a more abstract space emerges, shaping the atmosphere and emotional tone of the scene. The apparent independence yet simultaneous interdependence of these two layers is the source of the central tension in Aksu’s work.
 
At first glance, Aksu’s paintings greet the viewer with a familiar and accessible aesthetic language: meticulously rendered surfaces, everyday objects, and emotionally charged scenes. These compositions appear striking and immediately legible, a sensation that is far from accidental. The artist’s aesthetic is deliberately constructed through the visual language of kitsch.
 
Kitsch finds its origins in the second half of the 19th century, in the mass-produced, inexpensive, emotional, and easily consumable objects that flooded the market with industrialization. Long positioned in opposition to high art, it has often been defined by a lack of originality and depth. Yet reducing kitsch to a mere inferior aesthetic obscures how it operates. What renders something kitsch is its construction in a way that elicits an immediate, direct, and pre-coded emotional response from the viewer. Emotions such as nostalgia, romance, pain, and melancholy are heightened and presented in overt, theatrical forms. Bright, saturated colors, dense ornamentation, decorative repetition, easily readable symbols, and glossy surfaces form its core elements. Kitsch rejects ambiguity; it offers the viewer an almost ready-made emotional response. For this very reason, it assumes an ideological function, subtly determining what is considered beautiful and emotionally legitimate.
 
All of these elements are present in Aksu’s paintings. Quilted upholstery, Turkish carpets, flower vases, coffee cups, and roses are objects that are both culturally familiar and emotionally pre-coded. The figures dressed in white shirts, polished shoes, neat trousers, and carefully styled hair are immediately recognizable. They are the successful, orderly, and flawless figures repeatedly presented by visual culture: a manager, a white-collar worker, a body equipped with the visual language of power. Yet this familiarity is deceptive. Upon closer inspection, we realize that encountering such scenes in everyday life would be highly unusual: a figure balancing on a table, holding a fork between their inverted feet; bodies hiding within dense bushes through acrobatic gestures… While carrying all the symbols of power, these figures simultaneously become absurd within the struggle for power. These scenes are indeed absurd, yet they are constructed so skillfully through the familiar language of visual culture that nothing seems amiss until the viewer is already immersed. The moment this discrepancy is perceived, it introduces an irreversible question: why does something so absurd feel so familiar? This question lies at the very core of Aksu’s work. The artist does not employ absurdity to disturb the viewer; rather, he embeds absurdity within familiarity, prompting the viewer to question their trust in that familiarity.
 
Aksu’s compositions exist within the middle of a narrative: a moment where an action is interrupted, a tension reaches its peak, or an emotion freezes on the face. This is not coincidental. It speaks the same language as television close-ups that heighten tension, the jump cut editing of reality show intros, and the striking imagery of social media designed to halt scrolling. Here, the artist adopts a clear strategy: to critique the workings of spectacle and simulation, he borrows their very language reproducing what he critiques through its own tools. Just as Debord’s spectacle turns individuals into spectators of their own lives, Aksu’s works position the viewer in precisely this role.
 
The same strategy appears structurally through repetition, both within compositions and across the exhibition as a whole. The recurrence of a figure three times within a single canvas, the rhythmic repetition of quilted patterns across surfaces, or the alignment of rose stems are not merely formal choices but visual manifestations of a conceptual stance. Repetition is one of the fundamental organizing principles of modern industrial society: assembly lines, working hours, consumption cycles, social media feeds all operate through repetition. Over time, repetition normalizes, becomes invisible, and ceases to be questioned. Expected behaviors, social roles, and forms of identity function in the same way; what repeats sufficiently begins to appear inevitable. The critical aspect of Aksu’s use of repetition lies in the fact that it is never fully closed. Each repeated form, each returning image, never perfectly aligns with the previous one; subtle shifts, small differences, and unexpected ruptures are always present. Repetition reveals both the functioning of the system and its imperfections, exposing the cracks within it.
 
The narrative constructed through Aksu’s figures continues within the formal layers of his work. In his acrylic paintings on canvas, the application of paint is flat, controlled, and layered. Brushstrokes are not emphasized; instead, the surface conveys a smooth, almost digital quality. This cold, polished surface establishes a deliberate tension with the emotional intensity of the scenes, effectively plasticizing the figures.
 
In the works presented in Reality Show, large, flat areas of color come to the fore. There is no pursuit of soft transitions or atmospheric depth; each color remains within its boundary, sharply confronting the next. These encounters are not decorative; as in all of Aksu’s work, each contrast serves meaning. Dark, oppressive backgrounds black, deep grey, navy imbue the scenes with a sense of enclosure and weight. Against these, luminous elements a flame, red roses, a glossy vase, or tears appear fragile and isolated. This duality signals early on that what stands before the viewer is not reality but a constructed representation. It is precisely at this point that the formal and conceptual dimensions of Aksu’s work converge. The smoothness of the surface, the artificial precision of the compositions, the rhythm of repetition, and the absurd yet familiar presence of the figures together produce a regime of representation that makes visible how reality is constructed, circulated, and internalized.
 
Ultimately, Mutlu Aksu’s Reality Show does not offer answers. Instead, it opens up a space to reconsider how visual culture shapes everyday life and directs our sense of reality. The visual world Aksu constructs does not seek to define the boundary between the real and the constructed; rather, it reveals how porous and fragile that boundary has become. This is where the strength of the exhibition lies. It places the viewer on the familiar, reassuring surface of the known only to gently shift that surface. What remains is a single question: to what extent can what we call real life today truly be separated from the images that incessantly present it to us?
 
Öykü Demirci
March 2026
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