Act I
The Year 2025 Will Not Take Place
Mutlu Çerkez
Hot Wheels Athens hosted at TOSITSA3

Untitled: 14 September 2015 (1999), installation view, Mutlu Çerkez: selected works from an unwritten opera, Studio K, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 2000.

This exhibition reintroduces Mutlu Çerkez’s practice to a new audience, almost twenty years after his passing, through a two-act structure. At its core lies a commitment to a methodology that resists the conventions of progress: questioning originality, the hierarchies and distinctions between genres, and the assumption that we operate within an artistic system that privileges evolution and resolution over time. For Çerkez, artworks exist in a temporal contradiction—at once already in the past and deferred into a future. His was a practice, and this is a show, staged in permanent rehearsal.

Act I
Act I–taking place on November 12, 2025–restages a performative gesture first presented in Mutlu Çerkez: selected works from an unwritten opera at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, in 2000. In that exhibition, Çerkez reworked material from the Notes and More notes for an unwritten opera series (1997–1999), transforming an earlier work—a mute Marshall stack, Untitled: 14 July 2030 (from Stage furniture / props for an unwritten opera, 1999), switched on but unplugged—into a live sculpture incorporating a Moog theremin, the same model used by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page in Whole Lotta Love. It was a rare moment where Çerkez involved visitors, inviting them to contribute to his work by playing the instrument. Their improvised sounds were recorded and later released as a CD accompanying the exhibition catalogue. Following Çerkez’s conceptually underpinned score, the same gesture will be repeated at the gallery in Athens in 2025–visitors will again activate the theremin, their performances recorded and eventually released on the gallery’s website. The act is both an homage and contribution to Çerkez’s practice, and a prelude to the exhibition that will follow.

The work draws on two continuous currents in Çerkez’s practice. The first is the ongoing series An unwritten opera, initiated in 1992, which evolved through successive bodies of work—Notes, More notes, Make-up design studies, and Studies for the score—each expanding the conceptual idea of the original. Adopting the opera as a structural device rather than a narrative form, Çerkez used it to fold painting, set and graphic design, musical composition, video, and poster studies into an ever-expanding system of fragments that, together, might conceivably constitute the “opera.” Yet the semantics of their titles—the temporal contradiction between “unwritten” and “notes,” “studies,” “scores,” and “designs”—reveal these works as potential conspirators only to an unwritten narrative. Throughout these bodies of work, the “opera” functions as an open framework, positioned to absorb whatever is designated as part of it precisely because it remains in a continual state of incompletion. Çerkez imagined the production always proceeding “as though being watched in rehearsal”–a stage for unfinished material, now also without its author. Each work, then, extends the project without resolving it, continually deferring the possibility of its legibility.

A second current in Çerkez’s practice runs parallel: his enduring engagement with Led Zeppelin. A dedicated teenage fan, he often recalled how he had once stopped listening to their records because he “knew every smallest sound off by heart,” even the “squeak of the bass drum pedal.” Years later, a bootleg recording of a live concert renewed his fascination—“it was all different again”—and permanently folded the band’s presence into his practice. The bootleg, never identical despite returning to the same source, chimed with Çerkez’s own logics of production. Both imperfect and illicit, it became a model for an artwork that resists closure: not meant to endure, yet captured, replayed, repackaged, and recirculated—complicating notions of value and originality, and locating the potential for creativity precisely within repetition.

Act II
Act II will unfold as an exhibition of additional works by Çerkez, with the Marshall stack returned to its mute iteration. The opening—scheduled for November 22, 2025—will be accompanied by the full exhibition text and the many thanks owed to those who helped bring this show into being.

Act I:
Wednesday, November 12
19:30 - 21:30

Act II:
Saturday, November 22
18:30 - 20:30

Closing:
Saturday, December 20