Inner Issues

CENGİZ TEKİN

7 MAY 2013 - 15 JUNE 2013

PİLOT is pleased to host Cengiz Tekin's solo exhibition "Inner Issues" between 7 May and 15 June.

Cengiz Tekin, after his collaboration with Şener Özmen for the show Original Message (2009) at Outlet, continues his artistic adventure by representing his inner issues. The artist whose works display a state of hiding, concealing, acting and an uneasy anticipation in relation to the political reality of the geography he lives in, uses the silence and waiting as artistic opposition strategies. 

Tekin, with Inner Issues, doesn’t focus on the sensational aspect of "the border", but draws our attention to another situation, which he qualifies to be more urgent: one’s struggle against laws, rules and bylaws. To do so, Tekin sometimes uses the image of a border officer who seems to be caught in a hide-an-seek game, in front of the border which can be open or close to places or to persons (Border, print, 2012). To explain the strange insecurity of the protocols and ceremonies that seem to be endless, the artist filmed a red carpet that finds its end at a lake (Red Carpet, video, 2013). For his new exhibition Tekin mainly chose the photography, and with his unique sarcastic point of view, he explores the threshold between life and art as well as art and culture. Making videos he also invites us to discover an unknown world and varies the inner issues.

Inner Issues opens with a video that Cengiz Tekin realized in 2005 while he was invited to Munster, Germany, but couldn’t finalize and entitle until 2012. In “No Entry”, Tekin continues his use of stone, which is a recurring motif in his work, dating back to the photography “Here is no water, only rock” (2010).  A metaphor that revealed the “rocky” situations of the area in which he works and lives in, has expanded to include a fictional organizational critic. In the recent video, he plays an artist-in-residence trying to get into Landesmuseum, one of the major museums of art and cultural history in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. After being rejected entry to the museum, Cengiz Tekin confronts the unknown actor who blocked his way as he holds a piece of rock in his hand. The camera follows the artist as he runs through the city streets, until finally he arrives to the public park where he hid the piece of rock.

With “The Portrait of Cengiz Tekin with Epaulets” (2013), the artist once again has recourse to the recurring stone motif. In the photography, we see the artist carrying two pieces of stones on his shoulders like epaulets.

The uneasy anticipation can be seen at two photographs of the show: “The Ground Has Ears” (2010) and “Untitled (Backpackers)” (2012). As the artist explained to Özge Ersoy in an interview, “the aim is not to find the perfect frame, it is to choose a frame that comes closest to that image which perturbs” him.

Cengiz Tekin lives and works in Diyarbakir, Turkey. Among the recent exhibitions he contributed to are; Mediterrenean Biennial, Israel (2013), Signs Taken in Wonder, MAK Museum, Vienna (2012), Beautiful Game, Slovenia (2012), Consequences are no Coincidence, Pilot, Istanbul (2012), Alternativa 2011, Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Poland (2011), East by South West, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2011), Second Exhibition, Arter, Istanbul (2010).