Cengiz Çekil
Antrepo No.3
Feriköy Greek School

Born in 1945, Niğde. Lives in İstanbul.

Cengiz Çekil is a key figure in Turkish contemporary art, who from the 1970s onwards has searched for more engaging modes of artistic production and innovative aesthetic language capable of articulating the vast social transformations experienced by Turkish society after 1970. The selection of works in the exhibition shows his artistic production from 1976 to 1980 that mostly reflects the political tensions and dramatic social transformations preceding the coup d'état in 1980.
Water Heating Tool (1976) and Energy Plates (1976) use everyday objects to address questions of scarcity, resistance and the transience of everyday reality. The series Unwritten (1977) uses twelve successive covers from the popular daily newspaper Günaydın. The text is obscured with tape, so that only photographs remain visible. These displaced images include decontextualised portraits of political leaders, terrorists, workers, pop-stars and anonymous people, mixed together and without distinction.
Ranging from issues of suppressed sexuality to censorship, the series Seized Letters (1978) uses readers' letters about their sexual problems and dysfunctions published in the newspaper Hürriyet. The letters are rewritten on carbon paper and exhibited in reverse, thus rendering their content illegible.
In 1978, Çekil moved from İstanbul to work at the newly founded Faculty of Fine Arts at Ege University in İzmir. The photographic series Visual Tracks (1979) documents the artist's daily journey to work.