On Cengiz Çekil: In Conversation with Vahap Avşar

On Cengiz Çekil: In Conversation with Vahap Avşar

The below text is part of a series of monographic responses to the works of the late artist Cengiz Çekil (1945–2015). For this series, we invited artists and writers to write on Çekil’s conceptually rigorous, formally sparse practice, to be able to situate his works in the here and the now. Çekil’s use of quotidian materials to contemplate and comment on the trying circumstances in his native Turkey presents a visual lexicon that is straight-forward and condemning. His works retain their modus operandi of resistance, a politically charged concept that became a malleable, tangible material in his hands. As we try to grapple with what it means to publish with the artist at the center, his insistence on artists taking charge of their own processes of historicization comes to mind—”if not you, then who?”