CENGIZ ÇEKIL: 21.08.1945–10.11.2015
Edited by Ezgi Arıduru and Merve Elveren
Published by SALT/Garanti Kültür, Istanbul, 2020

After learning that Joseph Beuys had died in January 1986, the 41-year-old Turkish artist Cengiz Çekil sent flowers to the German Cultural Center in İzmir and telegrammed his condolence to the German Embassy in Ankara. He then set about organizing an exhibition called “In Memory of Joseph Beuys: An Other Art,” with 24 artists whom he believed shared the German artist’s spirit of formal experimentation and social criticism, and whose practices, in Çekil’s mind, represented the sincere belief that art is “a vessel of human/spiritual values, a product of the intellectual bodily toil of man.” Like Beuys, Çekil’s own artworks combined dichotomous impulses—humanistic and shamanistic, conceptual and rawly materialistic, rich in secret meanings yet nevertheless intended for the public.

Erden Kosova’s biographical overview in Cengiz Çekil: 21.08.1945–10.11.2015, a monograph initiated by Rampa gallery and published by SALT, begins to unlock many of Çekil’s mysteries by situating the artist in his various milieus—from his origins in a small Anatolian town to his career as an art-school professor in zmir from the late 1970s through the late 2000s. We learn about his two years as a teacher in rural Van, where his youthful leftist-idealism led to “inconclusive investigations for communism, Alevism and Kurdism”—an ideology, religious tradition, and ethnicity, respectively, that were considered antithetical to the Turkish state’s hegemonic principles; his 1972 enrollment in the Parisian studio of Henri Étienne-Martin and friendships with fellow artists from Turkey, particularly Sarkis and Osman Dinç, who were similarly inspired by Beuys and Marcel Duchamp; and how Çekil navigated the political violence in Turkey of the late 1970s, exemplified by his performative Günce (Diary, 1976), for which he stamped the words “bugün de yaşıyorum” (I am still alive) onto a kitschy notebook at the end of each day. Along the way, through vintage and recent photographs, the volume portrays the artist’s life and works, as we see Çekil and his friends, family, and many students, along with his collages, text-based paintings, found-object installations, and his minimalist, funereal, white-fabric sculptures laid out on the floors at seminal exhibitions of the 1980s and ’90s.

Additional essays focus on specific subjects. Among them, curator Vasıf Kortun traces the lifelong impact of Çekil’s studies at the modernist Gazi Education Institute in Ankara; art historian Sarah Neel-Smith explores his “dual practice” of producing figurative monuments of the state’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, during the 1980s rightwing military regime. An interview from 2011 with Hans Ulrich-Obrist allows us to hear the late artist’s own earnest reflections about how his wide-ranging practice—inspired as much by his father as Beuys and Duchamp—grew from “a time and place that struggled to keep up with the developed modern world with the aid of local means and creativity.”

HG MASTERS

BLOCKCHAIN CHICKEN FARM: AND OTHER STORIES OF TECH IN CHINA’S COUNTRYSIDE
By Xiaowei Wang
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2020

In Blockchain Chicken Farm, artist, writer, and coder Xiaowei Wang takes readers on a journey from Silicon Valley to farms and cities across China, examining the ideologies that are embedded in technologies. In the process, they work to dispel the binaries of rural/urban, ancient/futuristic, regression/advancement, and physical/digital that are commonly mapped onto these places.

Each of the book’s eight chapters meanders between interviews with tech entrepreneurs and users, including farmers; the political history of China’s agrarian reforms and its current Rural Revitalization plans; Wang’s personal reflections; and wide-ranging theoretical references. The publication even features three sino-futurist recipes. But its most striking feature is Wang’s call for compassion, which forms the foundation of their endeavor to break through dichotomous thinking. “In simply critiquing, we remain caught in the long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation . . . Tech creates isolation, tech connects marginalized communities,” they write in the introduction. “The way to respond to crisis is to practice compassion.”

In the second chapter, Wang problematizes the cynical origins of blockchain technology, a distributed record-keeping system that prevents rogue individuals and authorities from “ruining it for everybody,” as Wang quotes from the founder of the blockchain payment company Lightning Network. Elucidating the Hobbesian distrust in human nature and central governing figures that drives blockchain, Wang likens the technology to an authoritarian regime that puts up a facade of trustworthiness while its inner workings—coded by mostly White male developers, in the case of blockchain—are only legible to the select few.

Searching for definitions of innovation beyond those dictated by Silicon Valley, Wang contrasts blockchain with counterfeit products known as shanzhai. Instead of viewing it as replication, Wang claims shanzhai “argues for the right not only to use a device or software but also to collaboratively alter, change, and reclaim it.” As an example of the shanzhai ethos in action, Wang cites Guangdong’s Rice Harmony Collective, whose members refashion existing machines into shared tools for tilling rice paddies, which are distributed by lottery. Since each family’s plots are scattered across the hillside, the wellness of the ecosystem is of equal interest to all—one farmer’s use of pesticide will affect not only their other parcels further down the irrigation channel but those of others.

In valuing compassion and collectivity over individualism, Wang holds true to the principle of “interbeing,” a term coined by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh to replace “being” and “nonbeing.” It is in this state beyond binaries that we can recognize our present realities more wholly. Wang drives home the importance of this in the instructions for “How to Eat the World.” Playfully nodding to Planet B schemes, the recipe for mooncakes made of moon-grown maize satirizes how we use technology to superficially respond to problems “without taking time to think about the maintenance and care of what we have in front of us.”

CHLOE CHU

Politics of Food
Edited by Aaron Cezar and Dani Burrows
Co-published by Delfina Foundation, London; and Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2019

Every living organism is invested in a sufficient food supply. As curator Dani Burrows writes in the introduction for Politics of Food, a compilation of projects commissioned by the Delfina Foundation as part of a six-year program: “What could be more familiar than food?” To the credit of everyone involved, the volume succeeds in surfacing all that is unfamiliar about food through a selection of interviews, essays, and creative contributions that elucidate its many facets, from its production and distribution to its role in community-building and climate change.

As our planet is ravaged by unsustainable practices and billions go hungry while tons of food go to waste, it has become clear that what we eat is inextricably tied to issues of ecology, economy, and power. Politics of Food is at its most enlightening when dissecting the opaque workings of food supply. In “The Epistemology of the Shopping Cart,” academic and activist Raj Patel explains how market-based practices like fair-trade certification merely sideline workers’ rights as a function of consumer choice. Artist-researchers Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) examine food origin, characterizing the British Empire’s attempt to drive demand for “exotic” goods from the colonies as an economic justification of racist imperialism. Reprinted alongside the essay is a recipe card for Empire Remains Christmas Pudding (2013), based on a vintage design but with the colonial origins of the ingredients crossed out and replaced with vague indications such as “Packed in the UK,” which typify contemporary supermarket items. As the duo argue, “New economies of origin do not promote a sense of place but the erasure of it,” making it easy for brands to quietly switch suppliers in the event of wars, natural disasters, and other situations that impact yield and profit margins.

Several artists point to small-scale, localized food production as a more ecologically and ethically sound alternative. Thomas Pausz explains the benefits of “hacking” allotments, which he did by growing dandelion on Delfina’s roof and using the plants to make champagne, bio-rubber, and more. Nick Laessing offers a glimpse of the future with Plant Orbiter (2017), a wheel-shaped hydroponic system based on a NASA-patented rotary garden that accelerates growth; hydroponics are already proving useful on islands where rising sea levels have negatively impacted the soil and food imports are unaffordable.

Among the most visually arresting elements in this text-heavy book are the color plates of Senam Okudzeto’s Porte-Oranges (2004– ). Inspired by the orange stands of Ghanaian women street vendors, Okudzeto’s sculptural configurations of metal rods and circles reconceptualize these practical objects as a form of vernacular minimalism derived from the material culture of urban Ghana. Porte-Oranges exemplifies the kind of expansive thinking espoused by the book, illustrating how a humble fruit stand encompasses not just a set of socioeconomic specificities but also legacies of human ingenuity.

OPHELIA LAI