Cengiz Çekil
I Am Still Alive
Arter, Istanbul

Stepping into Cengiz Çekil’s retrospective at Arter, “I Am Still Alive,” visitors were confronted by WHAT TIME IS IT? (2008), a work consisting of 12 clocks mounted in a circle on the wall. Imprinted with the artist’s name, each clock was one hour behind the next, with only one showing the local time in Istanbul. This initial encounter set the stage for the exhibition, reflecting the artist’s fascination with the interplay between temporality and timelessness. It captured the underlying tension experienced in Çekil’s sculptures and installations—namely, a sensation of being bound to time, acutely aware of its perpetual passing. 

Spanning his career from the mid-1970s to his death in 2015, “I Am Still Alive” took its name from Çekil’s influential work Diary (1976), which emerged from a turbulent period in Turkish history, marked by intense violence and street protests between groups with opposing ideologies. After returning from Paris where he studied on a state scholarship between 1970 and 1975 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Çekil began to pioneer Turkish conceptual art, using everyday objects as his main artistic materials. In Diary, for instance, Çekil stamped each page of a flowery notebook with the date and the phrase “I am still alive,” a ritual maintained for about two months. The chronicle concludes simply with: “I am going for my military service.” This artwork stands as a testament to life’s fragility, while shedding light on the sociopolitical pressures that envelop human existence.