Liminal Crossing (2009)

Two channel synchronized (1920x1080) HD video, sound, 7’ 45”

Liminal Crossing, was commissioned by Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen
in 2009. The film is a re-enactment of an episode, which took place during the migration exodus of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey in 1989. The scenes were filmed at the border checkpoint between Bulgaria and Turkey and show an upright piano being pushed and pulled by hand between the two borders leaving Bulgaria and entering Turkey. The procession passes through the buffer zone between the two states, a no-man’s land, that becomes liminal and redefined, creating a sense of demarcation, dislocation and reinterpretation.

“...in Liminal Crossing the sheer near-absurd incongruity of rolling a piano across the border between two states is the combined effort of a small group of people, and so on. The charged images, the carefully composed shots, the highly choreographed camera sweeps, and the no less specifically organized installations each mark how the narrative and thematic fabrications – the philosophically-inclined and evidently theatricalized staging of discourses of experience – blatantly exhibit that they are results of a detailed and precise planning, set-construction and editing. What is manifest here is in other words a labour of the image, a labour that is here condition for and in communication with the depiction of labour qua condition of the global imaginary. What Cavusoglu presents across these dimensions of representation and its construction is then a ‘labourscape’.” Suhail Malik (2011)