As the routines of the daily flow of life evolve, our relationship with time also changes, affecting how we measure, perceive, and control it. Today’s reality defines time as money. In today’s world, the adage “time is money” reflects a capitalist ideology that influences our understanding of time. The former bank safe in Minerva Han’s building, which once stored cash, now holds the exhibition titled Thank You for Your Time.

The exhibition presents an alternative perspective on the bank’s capital-focused relationship with concepts of work, space, and time, contrasting the conventional principles and working hours of professional life. These conventional approaches often function in automatic, distant, and numeric worlds that differ from the process of art-making. Ece Yalçın highlights the spatial elements of the building, aiming to activate the waiting room. This approach transforms the space into a dynamic environment by referencing its architectural features. Beril Or, on the other hand, suggests shifting the focus away from the labor-time relationship within the capitalist system in response to the rapid institutional changes in the banking sector. These two different interpretations activate the time of the space at different paces.

A candle resembling a sundial melts, and the ashes from incense fill a 0.16 square meter box, the graphite from a sharpened pencil blunt after being rubbed to create a circle, causing the lines to transition from fine and thin to bold and thick, brush strokes outline and fill the paper until it reaches the end, a piece of paper collects the memory of the candle as a fume or many pieces of paper collect the fume from a single candle. All these methods represent her actions of burning, rubbing, filling, and collecting the forms of the objects. Over time and with movement, the forms transform from one state to another, leaving marks behind as a fourth matter.
The artist explores how our understanding of time has been shaped to align with contemporary norms for measuring labor. She proposes alternative methods of measurement, referencing ancient techniques. These performative actions, she engages in a repetitive circular movement that marks lines with varying thicknesses, and these marks ultimately become the artwork itself. Her self-imposed measurement methods embody a non-cognitive process, creating a context that is static yet meditative.. For the artist, the significance lies not in how long a candle burns, but rather in how much residue the paper can hold from the smoke. Similarly, she is more interested in the concept of time with a volume of 0.16 cubic meters than focusing on the duration it takes for the ash from hours of burning incense to fill a cube.

The piece titled What Happens When Nothing Happens? invites viewers- who often tend to stare at screens- to look at the clouds in the sky as an indication that time is passing clouds, which symbolize the flow of time. As the significance of time diminishes, the reality remains that it continuously flows. This artwork poses the question: how would time move without capitalism? A plant featured in What Happens When Nothing Happens? II displayed at the gallery seems to offer a potential answer. Can the relativity of time and the pace of natural processes enhance our perception of time more thoughtfully and profoundly? Through these inquiries, the artist encourages viewers to conduct their own experiments. Additionally, the piece titled Until allows viewers to stamp a minus sign on their bodies, so they would observe their very own passage of time as it gradually fades away.

Someone who enters a bank becomes the queue number itself, the moment they pull it. As they wait for a financial transaction, they realize that everyone around them is also an anonymous number. The security strips sort the numbers in order, and when it’s their turn, they see their number flickering on the LED screen, so they know which cashier is ready for them at the teller. Ece Yalçın observes these routines in banks and refabricates them. She relocates the teller’s cage and the waiting area, in the main hall and makes adjustments to some architectural details that echo these former bank interiors. Aware that this building was once used as a bank and is now the communication center of Sabancı University, she examines interior elements and their integrating function within the space, considering its site-specificity. The same conceptual approach applies to the room that used to be the bank’s safe and is now the Kasa Gallery. In her artistic practice, Yalçın studies ready-made objects and reinterprets them by blending them with her craft. While mimicking these objects, she emphasizes their minimal gestures and subtle characteristics, aiming to transform them into works of art through their inherent simplicity.
In the work titled Lunch Break, she transfers the tellers cage onto canvas. The space turns into a painting. In the series Rush Hour, she paints queue number slips taken to enter the bank line onto canvas. Canvases get humanized. These works reflect the existence of bank customers and the roles associated with procedures such as collecting a number, waiting, and making payments. These actions become dysfunctional without the presence of the customers, yet the objects related to these actions still serve as reminders. Objects reflect onto paintings. Waiting is so passive that it abstracts human beings, reducing them to mere numbers. At the same time, these canvases seem to measure an indefinite time or some form of ambiguity. In Rush Hour series Yalçın illustrates the relationship between time, space, and humans through the gaps left between canvases. The mimicked flower motif in Soft Copy represents where the customer would stand, which now appears on a new generation LED screen instead of queue numbers. This imagery also contrasts traditional designs’ naivety and aesthetics with today’s technology’s industrial mechanics.

Artists have differing perspectives on the same subject. Yalçın guides the viewer into the interior of the building, whereas Or focuses more on the public spaces and broadens her viewpoint beyond the building. Yalçın transforms the act of waiting in line while doing nothing into an art piece, while Or incorporates the act of gazing at the sky and doing nothing into her artwork.

Some catchphrases quickly become part of our daily lives and offer a certain practicality. However, when these phrases take on a fixed form in language, they also become normalized within society. The professional and distant farewell sentence Thank you or Your Time subtly implants subconscious perceptions regarding the value of time and its connection to capital, labor, and working processes and the learned boundaries surrounding these. Despite this common usage, we should express gratitude to those who aspire to transcend these limitations—those who seek to create new truths, times, and spaces that challenge and disrupt normative patterns that many prefer to maintain.
Thank you again for Your Time!

- Exhibition credit: Courtsey of the artist and Kasa Gallery Thank you for your Time, Kasa Gallery, Istanbul, 2024
- Photo credit: Mert Acar
- For more information; https://kasagaleri.sabanciuniv.edu/tr/portfolio/