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, Cekil’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 , a monograph initiated by Rampa, 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.
