‘WHAT TIME IS IT?’ Time Machines

Cengiz Çekil is one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey. He became acquainted with conceptual art when he went to Paris on a state scholarship in the early 1970s. Having gone beyond conventional materials, he continued to produce works with everyday objects and found items, incorporating the concept of time and its social and political dimensions into his work until his passing in 2015.

"Time Machines" consists of 180 battery-operated wall-clocks, stamped with his own name and laid out by Cengiz Çekil in an orderly arrangement without any other form of intervention. Unsyncronized and dissonant, they abstract time. Falling short of indicating what the time is, these machines, with their relentlessly locomoting metallic hands and rhythmic “tick-tocks”, reflect the strain and pressure pushed upon fleeting human life by the uninterrupted, ruthless passage of time. Çekil incorporated these ready-made objects into his installations in large numbers. This very act of replication stresses the availability and mundanity of the materials chosen by the artist.

"Time Machines" was displayed for the first time in Çekil’s solo exhibition titled "What Time Is It?", held in 2008 at the Yapı Kredi Kâzım Taşkent Art Gallery, along with other works bearing the same title as the exhibition and addressing the notion of time.