The ongoing struggle outlines the contours of a game whose rules no one fully knows. Aleyna Günay (based in Zurich) explores the dynamics of control and efficiency within a social space shaped by imperatives of productivity. Drawing on the histories of sculpture and conceptual art as well as on paradigms of the so called postmodernity, she focuses on the semantic functions of objects often perceived as mundane. Günay develops a critical perspective on the contemporary Western ethos, focusing on labor regimes in their dual function as sites of physical exertion and economic production.
In Untitled (Commodity-Form) (2025), show jumping obstacles are stripped of their functional value as mere sporting equipment. They become abstract markers of a system that disciplines and constraints bodies. For Günay, the horse – trained and regulated by the logic of competition – becomes a metaphor for the human subject operating within an environment where optimization is not merely encouraged but structurally imposed. (one might try to resist, but full escape is illusory) As in any structure governed by productivity, these bodies must conform to rules, meet the expectations of other bodies (the audience), and adapt to the demands of spectacle. They are alienated in a looped performance.
Günay extends this reflection to the field of contemporary art. Devoid of their characteristic colors, the apparent neutralization of the obstacles–echoing the cube that contains them–transforms them into signifiers of a broader mechanism. The artist stages the logics of inclusion and exclusion structuring systems of distinction and the effects of these structures on individual trajectories. Untitled (Commodity-Form) interrogates the tensions that delimit the field: strategies of differentiation, relations of power, the accumulation of symbolic capital, and the struggles of agents seeking either to preserve their position or to create a new one within a competitive economy.