As children, we played at being adults and couldn't wait to grow up. We sold chestnuts, nursed our teddy bears back to health and wore our parents' clothes. The world of big people seemed like a place where nobody had to dress up anymore, because everyone was finally who they wanted to be. But then one morning we woke up all grown up, rushing off to work with the feeling that the pretending had never stopped.

What is this adulthood thing, and how do you even do it? Back then, we knew it was just a game, but what about now? And where did all that joy and happiness go – the fun of playing something we're not?

Elena Ciolino and Zeynep Çamli, graduates of the Fine Arts III studio, use their exhibition An absurdly exaggerated piece of behavior: Adulting to question the effort to squeeze into a predetermined pattern of behavior in which the pursuit of happiness, conditioned by social hierarchy and capital, becomes ridiculous.

In photographs from the happening, the artists appear as cardboard-suited misfits, embodying the feeling that this kind of adulthood simply doesn't fit us. With subversive exaggeration, the exhibited images remind us how hard it is to break free from social conventions – and how easy it is to forget that they fundamentally shape our everyday behavior.