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3rd Cube
Breaking Ads!
As a Parallel Event of the 18th Istanbul Biennial, metr.cube’s third exhibition, 3rd Cube: Breaking Ads!, took place on 27 September at Galataport Paket Postanesi. For one day, the metr.cube truck parked on site and converted its LED façades into an open-air advertising surface.
This edition transformed the truck into a mobile billboard for a speculative product line designed to “simplify” the art experience. By adopting the visual language, rhythm, and persuasion strategies of advertising, 3rd Cube positioned visitors as consumer-subjects while simultaneously exposing the limits of that position. The circulation of spectators overlaid with the circulation of capital, compressing an exhibition day into a portable, marketable mini-economy briefly returned to the public realm.
The artworks were produced through a collective working process. metr.cube collaborated with a group of artists who met weekly over an extended period, developing the project through shared discussion, mutual feedback, and a deliberately horizontal structure. Rather than assigning roles or individual commissions, the group worked as a temporary production collective, allowing concepts, formats, and gestures to evolve through collective negotiation.
The resulting product line consists of seven pocket-sized works, each translating a familiar professional reflex of contemporary art culture into a consumable form.
Together, Avantgum, Iced, Le Vernissage, Deal, Postpak, Profet, and ExitRoll form a speculative product line that satirizes the rituals, anxieties, and micro-performances sustaining contemporary art culture. Each work converts a professional impulse into a tactile, wearable, or consumable object, revealing how labour, self-presentation, irony, and desire circulate as commodities.
Special thanks to NHK Collection for their support.
Curators: Begüm Çelik, Ayşegül Yapar
Artists:
Aslı Sinem Başar
Begüm Çelik
Zeynep Erkman
Nehir Sena Görür
Masha Pomortseva
Donato Renzulli
Ayşegül Yapar
Photo Credit: Ceren Aydoğdu
ExitRoll by Sinem Başar focuses on the social difficulty of leaving exhibitions. By assigning exit strategies through the roll of dice, the work shifts responsibility from the individual to chance. It highlights how even small acts of departure are shaped by social expectations and unspoken rules.
Profet by Begüm Çelik replaces strategic planning with divination. Using the structure of a tarot deck, the work responds to moments when rational analysis and data fail to provide certainty. By introducing chance into decision-making, it questions the belief that artistic careers and markets can be fully managed or predicted.
Avantgum by Zeynep Erkman uses chewing gum as a metaphor for speaking in the art world. The work focuses on the expectation to sound articulate, confident, and theoretically informed at all times..
Le Vernissage by Nehir Sena Görür translates the atmosphere of exhibition openings into scent. The perfume evokes feelings of anticipation, anxiety, and belonging that accompany professional art-world gatherings.
Deal by Masha Pomortseva addresses the rituals of networking within cultural spaces. The glove transforms a handshake into a scripted interaction, revealing how professional relationships are often pre-structured and transactional.
Iced by Donato Renzulli centers on moments of accident and loss of control. Spilled drinks and small social failures are frozen at the point they would normally be cleaned or apologized for.
Postpak by Ayşegül Yapar reflects on the pressure to document and circulate cultural experiences online. Presented as a hand sanitizer, the work suggests cleansing the impulse to post as a form of resistance. It proposes absence, rather than visibility, as an alternative mode of participation within contemporary art culture.