A war against non-recognition

Necmi Sönmez
3 saat önce
5 dakikada okunur

Emin Çizenel’s solo exhibition Unofficial Teams runs from October 9 to November 22, 2025, at Mine Sanat Galerisi. We reflect on the artist’s practice that resists Cyprus’s suppressed memory through his own imagery, redefining the political and personal boundaries of art

Words: Necmi Sönmez

Unofficial Teams, Exhibition view, 2025

After a long hiatus, Emin Çizenel opened his solo exhibition Unofficial Teams at Mine Sanat Galerisi. With his Cypriot identity and the fearlessness with which he addresses his subjects, Çizenel stands as one of the most significant artists of his generation.

Born in 1949 in Malya near Limassol, the artist completed his studies in 1974 at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, in the studio of Devrim Erbil. The political and social environment he encountered upon returning to his island not only altered his perspective on art but also reshaped his life. Cyprus, and Cypriot identity itself, long torn between Turkey, Greece, and the United Kingdom, became a leitmotif that Çizenel interpreted through his own distinctive imagery. The exhibition Unofficial Teams at Mine Sanat Galerisi, presented in Turkey for the first time, features paintings and three-dimensional works that reveal both the artist’s fifty-year professional journey and the political-imagistic intensity he has reached. It marks a significant point in his extraordinary artistic path, one that invites a closer look at his difference, solitude, and unique irony.

Unofficial Teams was first exhibited in June 2021 at Art Rooms in Kyrenia, curated by Oya Silbery, and was documented with a comprehensive catalogue. Reinstalled in Istanbul in 2025, the exhibition’s works demonstrate how the artist grapples with his cultural identity, positioning him as a kind of frontier figure who has persistently resisted the marginalization and exoticization inherent in the notion of a “Turkish identity outside Turkey.”

Emin Çizenel, Team

We must begin with the concept that gives the exhibition its title: Unofficial Teams. Following the 1974 Cyprus Operation, the island was divided in two, becoming a center of forced migration and political turmoil. Coincidentally, around that same time, a 25-year-old Çizenel had just graduated from the Istanbul Academy and was heading back home.(1) The scene awaiting the young artist, who wished to build a future as a painter, was one of uncertainty, fear, and a nightmare shaped by international pressure. Forced to relocate twice, his family settled in Northern Cyprus, where the young artist engaged in a profound struggle for existence, channeling what he saw and lived through into his work via a new visual mapping. His first solo exhibition, Childish (1979), brought together the first steps of this effort. After 1974, the Turkish community in the north of the island was pushed into severe international isolation, cut off from the rest of the world. When Çizenel speaks of “unofficial teams,” he refers primarily to this state of being unacknowledged, the cultural, political, and economic marginalization of the Turkish Cypriot community.

Emin Çizenel, Unofficial Teams, 205x283 cm

The work that lends its name to the series, Unofficial Teams (205 x 283 cm, mixed media on paper), depicts an eleven-member football team. Created in 2017, the painting is based on a photograph of the artist’s neighborhood team, which he formed with friends in 1967, at the age of twenty-one. Referring to a time before war, division, and othering, Çizenel immortalizes a moment from the past as a way of responding to present concerns. This act could be read as an attempt to view contemporary issues through the lens of history, and as evidence of his palimpsestic working process. The term “palimpsest”, once used to describe parchment erased and reused in antiquity, aptly evokes the artist’s long engagement with layering, memory, and meaning since the 1980s. In the works of the Unofficial Teams series, the fragmented surfaces also feature dried leaves and their direct imprints, creating new layers and textures. Written in the artist’s meticulous hand, both in Turkish and Greek, brief sentences open textual intervals within the compositions. By bringing together multiple temporalities, Çizenel paints a collective portrait of his old football team, transforming it into an act of resistance against the “erasure” of Cypriots’ existence under political and social pressures. The artist has explained this approach as follows:

The memory of a small society like ours could never be committed to written texts capable of preserving it each time. That’s a problem. It could not sing its traumatic fate into songs. In fact, it kept looking at its past through the eyes and ears of others, exoticizing itself. What I want to do by looking back is to find and ignite a lost memory filled with recollections. It’s like starting a football game five-nil down… To progress in both belonging and meaning, on the ground of the past interpreted anew, is my way of looking toward the future. That’s exactly what I try to do.(2)

Emin Çizenel, Self-Portrait, drawing, stencil, and wet stamp, 174x53 cm

One of the most striking works in the Unofficial Teams series is Çizenel’s self-portrait. Created in 2017, this elongated painting (174 x 53 cm) consists of four canvases stacked vertically, combining drawing, stencil, and wet seal imprints to focus on his image from 1967. Although the piece presents a young artist holding a football, the figure’s face and expression are deliberately blurred. By representing himself at twenty-one, Çizenel revisits the tensions and ruptures between Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities that failed to sustain coexistence during that period. Preparing for the Istanbul Academy’s entrance exams, the young Emin channels his state of “searching” into the core of his self-portrait. While it looks back to the past, the work simultaneously gestures toward the future. Its realism, reflecting the artist’s technical mastery, stands in contrast to the abstract forms he would later develop, underscoring the duality of imagery that defines his artistic language. Despite his exceptional draftsmanship, Çizenel distanced himself from the descriptive tendencies that trapped many of his peers, pursuing instead a conceptual and experimental direction. This shift is made explicit in the Mine Sanat Galerisi presentation, where the artist displays his self-portrait wrapped in packaging. Shown as an unwrapped canvas in the 2021 Art Rooms exhibition, the work appears in Istanbul covered with transparent film marked fragile, an ironic comment on the state of “unofficial existence.” In doing so, Çizenel reconsiders his relationship with the Istanbul art scene, where he received his training and maintained strong ties. The issue here concerns “visibility,” and the gesture carries a sharp critique of how Cypriot artists are marginalized in the so-called motherland.

Emin Çizenel, Untitled

In other works from the Unofficial Teams series, the artist folds scraps of fabric collected from tailors into triangles of various sizes, arranging them into compositions that invite multiple readings. Seen from different angles, these triangles evoke both masculine and feminine forms. Employing a meditative technique, Çizenel builds entirely abstract surfaces by layering these fabric pieces. Their arrangement, the “stacking” of folded triangles, has become one of the distinct visual codes of his painterly language. Alongside fabrics of various colors, he also folds and incorporates paper, envelopes, and magazine pages into his works, revealing his commitment to experimentation and discovery. The artist prints old stencil patterns onto these layered surfaces, deepening their textures and manifesting his fascination with palimpsest-like creation. This approach not only underscores his refusal to repeat himself but also reflects his pursuit of the new and the different.