The word “absurd” derives from the French absurde, meaning foolish, meaningless, or incongruous. Its etymological roots can be traced back to the Latin absurdus, likewise referring to that which is irrational or without meaning. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus defines the absurd as the tension between the meaninglessness of the world and the human desire to find meaning within it. In everyday life, too, when confronted with situations or events we cannot explain, our instinctive desire to make sense of the world turns toward understanding what resists explanation. Yet when reason reaches its limits, we resort to the word “absurd” to describe the contradiction, irrationality, or sheer impossibility of what we encounter: “How absurd!”
We find ourselves at a point where the world is becoming increasingly incomprehensible, contradictory, and absurd. Across every sphere of life, the rational systems of thought we have developed to explain and organize the existing order appear increasingly inadequate. In an age in which right and wrong become entangled, institutions once regarded as sources of trust are shaken, and shared narratives about the future begin to dissolve, the distance between our desire to comprehend reality as a coherent whole and the contradictions we encounter within it continues to widen.
In Baysan Yüksel and Merve Erbilgiç’s duo exhibition, The Joy of the Impossible, the absurd is not approached as a simple synonym for the nonsensical, comic, or surreal. Rather, it emerges as a method, an attitude, and a form of intervention that renders visible the contradictions inherent within reality itself. At times, the way to understand the world is not to attempt to explain it further, but to push the irrationality already embedded within it one step further. The most effective way of exposing the absurd is not to organize it as though it were rational, but, through an absurd gesture, to carry its own absurdity to an extreme. In doing so, an absurd response can strip authority of its mask and expose the logic that sustains and directs the absurd itself.
The exhibition does not attempt to illustrate or explain the absurd. Instead, it seeks to establish a space of freedom that moves between humour and discomfort. A space in which certainty can be suspended, familiar structures can be displaced, and meaning can remain open to reconfiguration.
Erbilgiç departs from the narrative structure of illustration. Rather than employing images as elements that explain or complete a predetermined story, she approaches them as visual fragments open to multiple readings—moving between memory, sensation, intuition, and chance, where meaning is simultaneously constructed and undone. In the works she has produced for The Joy of the Impossible, drawing on the poetry of Orhan Veli, the everyday is reconstructed through personal experience, memory, and emotion. Here, the poetic and the absurd occupy the same terrain.
In Yüksel’s works, routines, beliefs, traditions, and consumer culture are brought into question, while stories unfold through dreams, universal symbols, animals, plants, and fantastical characters. The King Child, the red horse that never neglects to comb and care for its mane, the white tulip, plants that do not exist, and strange creatures… A childlike sense of hope and joy intersects with a feeling of revolt, giving rise to fictional scenes situated between questioning and acceptance.
Bringing together two artists who approach their time and surroundings from distinct perspectives, The Joy of the Impossible converges upon the same irrational ground through poetic, witty, and fantastical modes of expression oriented toward the possibility of hope. Erbilgiç first disrupts, fragments, and renders the absurd uncertain, while Yüksel generates forms of resistance from within this space of ambiguity. In a rebellious acceptance reminiscent of Sisyphus, both artists explore the possibility of making room for joy and hope within a fictional world seemingly deprived of meaning.
Here, joy is not understood as a naïve form of escape, but as an insistence on producing one’s own responses and possibilities. The familiar is gently distorted; the everyday opens onto new associations; reality is reconstructed. It is an insistence on creating meaning in the face of meaninglessness, hope within despair, and one’s own joy amid the absurdity of existence.
Perhaps chaotic times require equally unruly works of art. Here, joy is not an afterthought but a generative force a means of making, responding, and beginning again.
