In the 1970s, Cengiz Çekil (1945–2015) fell under the spell of Arte Povera and the practice of Joseph Beuys. Using materials such as bedsprings, stones, and Coke bottles, he mastered bricolage, as the fifty sculptures, installations, and paintings in his retrospective “I Am Still Alive” prove. Many of Çekil’s works are site- and time-specific, so Eda Berkmen and her curatorial team at Arter had to rebuild them by using new material and following the artist’s detailed instructions. In Obsession, 1974/2013, Çekil reimagined a black-leather pencil case he found at a Paris atelier as a spiderlike vulva at the center of a web made of hemp cords strung from a wooden frame. The zipper’s teeth become an uncanny symbol of castration anxiety. Clandestine Light, 1987/2010, is a square mausoleum of gray concrete slabs stacked on a white cloth. Light emanating from a fluorescent lamp within gives a sense of life defying a crushing weight. This use of light as an emblem of resistance finds its most striking expression in Towards Childhood, Since Childhood, 1974/2010. Inspired by the Vietcong guerrilla tactics against the invading US forces, Çekil emptied twelve Coca-Cola bottles, tied them to sticks, and—using string, electric tape, and light bulbs—transformed icons of capitalism into a set of ready-made Molotov cocktails. When this work debuted in Çekil’s first Paris show in 1975, the bottles pointed to a north-indicated compass mark, embodying an ideological attack on the Global North. The version exhibited at Arter takes its cue from Vas?f Kortun’s 2010 Çekil retrospective at Rampa, Istanbul, where the bottles were aligned in three rows like army ranks.
Another seminal work, Reverse Image, 1980, produced in the wake of Turkey’s military coup of that same year, comprises a camera obscura and a microphone bringing the sights and sounds outside the gallery inside. The upside-down landscape, not recorded but streamed (as we now say) in real time, inspires reflection on the transience of the image. The installation was Çekil’s attempt to counter the veneration of realism among socialist painters and a reminder of radical art’s uphill battle against the mass-media proliferation of images. Berkmen installed the work in a gallery whose windows overlook a street undergoing gentrification, contrasting inside with outside in a gesture Çekil might have appreciated.
Awakening, Communication Stone, 1987, is another work that ponders the ideas of inside and outside and that summons a ghost from the artist’s youth. While he worked as an art instructor in eastern Anatolia in the 1960s, Çekil’s radical teaching methods and leftist worldview caused suspicion among local nationalists who threw a stone at his bedroom window one night, firing a shot afterward in an apparent attempt to kill him. Çekil, awake in the kitchen, survived the attack and found inspiration in the use of the stone as a weapon—a tactic he would employ to artistic ends. By padding a cobblestone he found nearly twenty years after the event with a piece of thick canvas, stamping it with his initials and strapping it all together, Çekil repurposed the object as an embodiment of the fears that reigned over his formative years and a reminder of how anxieties about death inspired his art. Ironically, Diary, 1976, a work comprising a school notebook whose every page Çekil stamped with the words I AM STILL ALIVE in Turkish before going to sleep—a gesture resembling On Kawara’s monochromatic “Today” series, 1966–2014—isn’t on display at the Arter show to which it gave its title.
My Father’s Will, 2014/2023, a large wooden cabinet with glass doors containing tools that belonged to Çekil’s father, a watch repairman, is exhibited for the first time. Also holding the gravestone his father designed for himself on its lowermost shelf, this metonym of a family legacy traveled with the artist for years. The work is typical of Çekil’s practice, embodying a private history in a sparse language that displayed as much as it concealed. His father’s gravestone and watch parts remain locked inside, available to be only glimpsed or imagined from the outside. For Çekil, provocative artistic work resided in the corollary to that act of encounter, in the spectator’s imaginative and subjective auto-completion.
— Kaya Genç