Not long ago, in a gallery on Istanbul's İstiklal Avenue, I came across an artwork that left me perplexed about how to approach it. Made of particle board, brass, optic quality acrylic, vibrational motors and a capacitive sensor, Doruk Kumkumoğlu's "Unearthed" looks like a diptych photograph from afar. But that first impression changes once you come near the work. As you approach it, electric cables emerging from the canvas catch your attention. Only when you come closer and move your hands around its surface does the work start making sounds and vibrating and suddenly alive, the work responds to your movements and your position. The closer you get to it, the louder it gets. Now, that is not something you come across in Istanbul galleries every day. "Unearthed,", a truly intriguing work by a 22 year old, İzmir-born artist, is on display at Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize Exhibition which has been organized for the 34th time this year.An undergraduate at Bilgi University's Visual Communication Design Department, Kumkumoğlu has lately focused on photography and its connections with other methods of representation. "'Unearthed" aims to create an extra layer of information on a photograph through sound, instead of using a static form of representation," he says in the exhibition catalog. "This layer is, in a sense, the temporal representation of the excavation site photographed for the work. The installation features an acoustic record of the way a piece of rock is torn to pieces and the changes it undergoes. That these acoustic records only reveal themselves when the viewer comes close it is a central feature of this work's relationship with the viewer."Kumkumoğlu's work was chosen by a jury of curator Irina Batkova, Professor Dr. Hasan Bülent Kahraman, Painting and Sculpture Museums Association board member Gönül Nuhoğlu and Akbank Sanat Manager Derya Bigalı. The jury has looked at work by third and fourth grade students, masters and doctorate students from universities' fine arts, communications, art and social sciences and arts and design faculties. They received work from 360 students and had to come up with just 10 names. The prize money, TL 30,000 ($10,190), was then divided between Burak Eren Güler, Kıvanç Martaloz, Doruk Kumkumoğlu and Nurtaç Ulutürk."The theme of Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize Exhibition 2016, "Future Passed," sets a wide scope for visual artists whose works took part in the selection for the exhibition and the awards," writes curator Irina Batkova in the exhibition catalog."This exhibition reveals the contemporary artist as an explorer of a world whose dynamics is determined by social and political turbulence, a world where the future seems more and more unpredictable. The present imposes on us a constant revision of concepts we have been used to and which we haven't called in question. Time is one such concept - it is part of the notion of stability and permanence of the values that give structure to our daily lives. We are surrounded by equipment that counts daily the passing seconds, minutes, hours the way we measure barometric pressure, temperature, the weight of objects, etc. But the uncertainty in the surrounding reality is relevant to the dynamics of discoveries in science that we perceive as objective, since time has a number of other characteristics in areas of knowledge that more or less can be defined as subjective. A new theory in quantum mechanics claims that the structure of time can be regarded as the crystal structure consisting of discrete, regularly repeating elements. "One of the most intriguing works of the show, Derya Kazan's (23) "REC," seems quite basic, a red film folio, a 220 watt lamp socket and a 1000 megawatt bulb, it simply lights a 2-meter diameter space on the second floor of the gallery. But once you get under its light this impression changes. Another similarly simple and mesmerizing work, placed next to Kazan's light installation in the corner of the second floor is Burak Eren Güler's "Untitled," which is coil, plywood and iron bars. It is 609 x 609 centimeters, making it is a massive work and, on the face of it, seems little more than a pedestal carrying nothing.Born in Ankara in 1989, Güler is a graduate of the Fine Arts Faculty's Sculpture department at Kocaeli University. "I have learned about the competition through the internet," he said. "My work is a kinetic installation that asks the viewer to step onto it. When you look at it from a far, the work is just standing there doing nothing. But once the viewer steps onto the work, the sound is turned on and this way the work transforms the temporality of the viewer.""Over the past 30 years, theories like the chaos theory and nonlinear systems make a much more fundamental sense for understanding the world and creating strategies in areas such as politics and economics than a deterministic linear understanding of processes as a link between cause and effect, which would set the parameters of a predictable future," the curator Batkova explains. "The works of the authors in the displayed selection form a visual environment of uncertainty in the obvious that illustrates not only the dynamics of change in our time, but also the inability to rely on the stability of our own perceptions of things. This uncertainty creates an idea of the future as a reality that has already taken place while we were trying to find new theories that make sense of the way in which the present functions."This sense of uncertainty of the future as a reality is most visible in Nurtaç Ulutürk's "Blade Runner," a video installation that shows a two minutes long clip from Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi film of the same name. A graduate of Fine Arts Faculty's Painting Department at Marmara University, Ulutürk has filmed a television set in such a way that the viewer can see "Blade Runner" and two people who watch it on a sofa, at the same instant. "My work aims to destroy the distinction between the viewer and the viewed film, and create a rupture in our linear understanding of time," Ulutürk said.