CENGIZ ÇEKIL
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CENGIZ ÇEKIL
Cengiz Çekil is one of the key figures of contemporary art in Turkey, who searched for new visual and formal definitions in art which could correspond to the dramatic social transformations of the seventies and eighties. Distant to the aesthetic conventions of academic conservatism of that time, Çekil made use of cheap everyday materials, such as stationary hardware items, construction materials, throwaway objects and daily publications. From various blocks of productions, a series of works originating from 1976 has recently found critical re-acclaim. Unwritten was composed of successive front pages taken from a popular Turkish daily, with blank paper glued on them so that only the illustrations remained visible. The effect of visuality was paradoxically enforced by this act of concealment and decontextualisation. Portraits of political leaders, terrorists, pop-stars, and now unnameable people bled into the images of rallies, trials, public speeches, crimes committed and events impossible to remember and to make sense of. Çekil´s minor interventions on the newspapers exposes the nauseating social schizophrenia of a politically charged society whose sense of collectivity has been slowly wittled down during the last two decades. During the first half of the nineties, another sequence of works by Çekil was exhibited in group shows which strongly influenced the Turkish art scene. These sculptural installations with square, rectangular and symmetric forms were composed of piled-up construction materials, such as bricks, wooden beams, steel plates, and thick plastic sheets. These items which weren´t cemented to each other, obviously referred to the growing inner migration and the ephemeral and fragile character of the new illegal slums “built overnight” in the hinterlands of big cities. There was a certain neutrality and indifference in stance emanated from these installations. Çekil opened them up to wider interpretation through references to primordial ideas, which transcended the actual reality of the social phenomena, such as the family unit, the need for shelter, the building of a temple, and the ideal forms of geometry. Erden Kosova |