ARTICLES

Mobility
Peter Adey, Routledge (2017)

Similarly, Tim Creswell and others have been enthralled by the Bulgarian-born artist Ergin Cavusoglu's installation Point of Departure during a conversation in Bristol in 2006. The installation, for Nilgun Bayraktar, acts to 'engulf' the participant through multiple video screens creating a pseudo airport actually made up of filmography from Trabzon, Turkey, and Stansted Airport, London. Cresswell comments on Cavusoglu's use of frames - which resonate with Verstraete's grids - to depict the different kinds of visual technologies that capture and categorize mobile peoples, the various practices of watching and looking both enforcement agencies and publics perform un the asynchronous streaming of footage from different positions of subject or agent. Bayraktar (2015:190) also reminds us that the airports where the footage from Point of Departure was taken are more at the edges of European mobility. Cavusoglu's footage is built from highly differentiated mobilities between Stansted and Trabzon, located on the Silk Road route on the Black Sea coast, rather than the more glistening hub airports at the centre of Europe's aerial nodes. Of course, it is not only artists who examine these tendencies within visula media, but popular cinema also exposes and to a great extent has exploited these landscapes and flows of illicit European mobilities for an equally dramatic effect. (pp. 40-41)

Ergin Cavusoglu
Which sun gazed down on your last dream?
Exhibition brochure text by Nicole Dee O'Rourke (2016)

Which sun gazed down on your last dream?* : A question that Charles Baudelaire asks in his ‘On Wine and Hashish,’ (1860), a seminal work on the effervescence of intoxication, its ability to render a person outside of time, memory, and place. It is an inherently surreal question too, and one perhaps that only the ‘intoxicated’ can poetically and surreptitiously ask; it is also a question that asks ‘where,’ but of a ‘where’ that is placeless, nationless, outside of borders, a ‘where’ which is almost spiritual. 
Ergin Cavusoglu’s third solo exhibition at Rampa, Which sun gazed down on your last dream?, (March 10 – May 7, 2016), is in fact akin to variants of this question, and to a kind of metaphoric inebriation from wondering and wandering subliminally about and in the trivialities of the world, stuck in an in-between, a liminal space. Cavusoglu has an engendered interest in the idea of travel, or movement and migration—not just of people, but of things, objects, ideas. In this he nds the space or place, the surrealities that most interest him. But, it is not the imbedded meaning of the thing that he nds most fruitful. This Duchampian ideology runs throughout this multifaceted exhibition, (which includes video, sculpture, painting, and photography), as well as his ouevre. Spaces of temporality or placeless spaces are precisely the point for Cavusoglu. In an in-between space room is left for possibilities, for thought, a “space to think.” Indeed, nding the beautiful in anything 
is a spiritual awakening of sorts, and seeing the beautiful in everyday things is the kind of Dadaist hymnal that Cavusoglu’s works ask us to revel in. 
It is not all about beauty of course. It is also about fate, leaps of faith, uncertainty, and about looking at things differently —all of which indicate a certain kind of in-betweenness. In the project room at Rampa sits ‘Place After Place,’ 2008, a colored perspex and ourescent light installation. It looks like a lighthouse of the future, signaling as a point of reference. It unconsciously locates; but where you are coming from or where you are going cannot be determined. Again, it is about being in transit, in-between. Cavusoglu’s interests are ethnographic, but the ethnography of the non-place, and the not-yet-de ned pluralistic world with its border-fear that is gradually becoming a reality. He studies culture and its production in the form of the human condition. He is interested in what is called duende, a feeling de ned as a mysterious something that all feel and no amount of philosophy can explain —a feeling that is a question. This is where non-places and non-art become paramount for Cavusoglu and where he believes art realizes its full potentials. In ‘Black Tresses (Duende),’ 2016, you see a bronze cast of a set of hands interlocking. The wrists are bound by human hair. The hands are at once seemingly at prayer or in the act of cleansing, but they are also the hands of the artist and perhaps an allusion to the hand of the creator. The work takes its cue and conceptual framework from a passage in book by Federico García Lorca entitled Gypsy Ballads (1928). 
“If I should happen to die I order you 
tie up my hands with your black tresses.” 
The lyrics are poignant and Cavusoglu’s response was to contextualize the idea and shift its domain from the performative to the visual. 
Alike to an abstract lighthouse guiding you through the whatevers and whereevers of the world, and alike to the feeling of duende and the way it manifests in human activity and spirituality, is Tarot. Tarot is an occult system of belief. And it is a belief that the renders the facts of the future seemingly accessible — an idea that is essentially the basis of all human desire for, and belief in irrationality and fate. In Cavusoglu’s ‘Rock Jump’, 2014, series of photographs people are captured in a moment of suspense, mid-leap. At bottom left a Tarot card is referenced by its latin number and name. The photographs in the series reference the Tarots for Judgement, The Sun, The Fool, Wheel of Fortune, The Magician, Justice, and The Hanged Man. They are all Tarots from the Major Arcana. The speci cs of Tarot is reliant on whether the card is pulled upright or downward, only a change in direction causing quite a difference in reading. This, again, lends to Çavusog?lu’s slant toward and interest in duality and liminality. In Tolstoy’s ‘A Confession,’ (1882), he compares being sent to sea with a direction, thereafter getting lost and going adrift, rowing against the current all while encountering others having the same struggle, only to remember later that the oars, the boat, and the direction you were given at the start will lead you to shore. He writes, ‘That shore was God; that direction was tradition; the oars were freedom given me to pull for the shore and unite with God. And so the force of life was renewed in me, and I again began to live.’ It is a choice. But the question remains whether it is a choice of your own. 
In-betweeness is dependant on duals and functions because of a clear indication of there being opposites or difference —choice — and most certainly movement. Perhaps the most clear dual that runs throughout Cavusoglu’s exhibition is that of solidity and liquidity, and more precisely, rock and sea. The space between rock and sea is no less of the earth that the natural elements that bookend it, but it is a space less de ned, spiritual in its cosmic reference and ambiguity. With this you can go on to the many duals apparent to humanity, and their endless reliance on each other. In the same way rock is corroded by water, water is diverged by rock; each changes the other, whether for better or worse. And, in the case of Tolstoy’s metaphor, rock or land is salvation while the rough waters are only suitable for those in doubt. So, in Cavusoglu’s photographs there is, with the references to Tarot, also this metaphoric presence of the un-captured instants despite the distilled moment of deep individuality and abandonment. He captures the ambiguous and sees the beauty in that. 
André Breton wrote ‘Arcanum 17’ in 1945, just after the end of World War II. The title directly speaks to Tarot, and speci cally to the 17th card, Star. The Star is non-knowledge, it is surrealist. In the book he laments the perfect beauty of a rock situated in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, Canada, and even goes so far as to presume that, if measured, the golden ratio would occur in the rock. It appears to the naked eye as that beautiful and perfect. The rock, Percé Rock, is in fact the most photographed rock in the world, and sits slowly corroding in the sea. It is a nature-made, ready-made, perfect work of Art. A thing that causes duende. Cavusoglu has collected postcards from many times periods depicting the rock, and re-created a scaled-down, yet large sculpture of the rock, epynomously titled. With this sculpture is another series of photographs titled ‘Étant Donnés,’ 2016, named after Duchamp’s nal and infamous work. In the series Cavusoglu takes photos over which he superimposes the diagram for the golden ratio, often nding and maybe even forcing a perfect something about an average scene. The nature-made converges into a man-made. 
Again using Duchamp as a reference, Cavusoglu titles his sculpture, ‘Fountain,’ 2016, after the artist’s famous early ready-made. Like ’Percé Rock’ he takes a nature-made or hand-made and makes it into Art in a manner so as to both critique and proselytize the whole process. But, in the case of ‘Fountain,’ the object that he uses predates Duchamp’s urinal by more than a century, and is a bronze cast of a hand-carved wooden table with an embedded toilet basin. Here Cavusoglu juxtaposes mass-production with specialized production all the while also speaking to art and history. And in so doing it becomes itself a kind of liminal and transitory object, an object of in-betweenness. The same goes for his paintings, like ‘Spheres of the Firmament - Anthropomorphism IV,’ 2016, in which he paints the Pergamon Alter collaged with and made surreal by additions that often reference back to his past works or even sometimes to other works in the exhibition. In these works you see Cavusoglu again speaking to production levels but also to rock, something in nature, being crafted and cultured by human aesthetics and the desire for art and representation. The paintings are surreal in their appearance and too, in their ability to ethnographically capture human desire to transform nature, or make art from that which already exists as something else. James Clifford (1988) asserts that “...modern surrealism and ethnography began with a reality deeply in question. The contrast is in fact generated by a continuous play of the familiar and the strange, of which ethnography and surrealism are two elements.” Cavusoglu’s work does the very same, con ating the familiar and the strange in a surrealist effort to ethnographically locate humanity and human spirituality (in the sense of the desire to create art). 
In Cavusoglu’s two video works on view for the exhibition all of the above ideas and paradigms come into the moving image. In ‘Silent Glide,’ 2008-09, a three-channel synchronized video installation with sound, he tells the story of a young academic who found himself anchored in Hereke, a city in Turkey once known for their beautiful silks and now home to Noah, a huge cement production facility. Already here is a nod towards production levels, from hand-made to machine-made, and too to duality. The irony in the name of the factory is not lost, either. The story that unravels in the video is that of both spiritual questioning and love lost; in it the protagonist quote’s Tolstoy’s ‘A Confession.’ Water is always a presence in the video, and the cement factory a literal and metaphoric representation of the trenchant parallel that is water and rock and the ways they are both symbiotic and corrosive. 
In ‘Lundy, Louis, Barge, and Troy,’ 2014, a two-channel synchronized video with audio, Cavusoglu goes underwater to shipwrecks from the Battle of Gallipoli in World War I. On one screen are the shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea, slowly rolling in a birds- eye view, and on the other screen is the same point of view, but looking above at the surface of the water. The past and present day are seen together both breathing with life, whether nostalgic or current. The work is about remembrance and reconciliation, about estrangement, a liminal thought-space. The viewer is even placed in-between the focal points of the video, oating somewhere beneath the surface of the water. Solid and liquid are ubiquitous and just like the suspense of Tarot, liminality a constant. 
Cavusog?lu is interested in the past as much as he is the present and future. His interest in Tarot, in literature and theory and philosophy being just an instinctual move towards better understanding, and the creation of work acting like totems of his attempts at understanding and parsing through and around the present moment. The works in Which sun gazed down on your last dream? each tell its own story while also critiquing modes of production in art—the very same way the artists and thinkers he references did and still do. Everything is a metaphor and everything is not. 
*This quote is paraphrased slightly from the original text by Baudelaire, which reads: ‘Which sun gazed down on his last dream?’

Ergin Cavusoglu
Adaptation – Cinefication
Exhibition brochure text by Özge Ersoy (Rampa, Istanbul, 2014) 

In a conversation in February, Ergin Cavusoglu explained why he wanted to quit painting in 1992: “I was no longer interested in perspective, rendering the human body, or the depth of colour—but instead what the image could say about itself on a conceptual level.” The premise of Adaptation – Cinefication lies in this recurring question, as the artist has a reflexive distance from his mediums, be it painting, photography, sculpture, video or installation. Exploring the very idea of ‘image-making’ and thus ‘art making’, the exhibition consists of two parts: “Adaptation” includes a selection of paintings and sculptures that inquire into the memory of images, and “Cinefication” presents a compilation of single channel video works in a screening room setting, which strengthens the sense of proposed disparateness that is commonly observed between the other works on display.  

Instant, 1998, an early series of five canvas board paintings, shows Cavusoglu’s penchant for image-making as a thought process. In this work, the artist portrays images of mundane interior and exterior spaces in the unique twenty-four inches Polaroid-size format, enveloped by blackened frames or obscured by black squares. Depicting a gloomy hospital room, a messy bathroom, or a dim aircraft cabin, the images evoke snapshots, or rather instant photographs that do not carry any personal references, thus becoming generic visuals. The act of painting, however, is in stark opposition with the cold and measured quality of these images. Cavusoglu reverses the idea of immediacy as he takes on a slow, meticulous, manual process to recreate his source material (or imaginary scenes). 

In the complementing pair of paintings, he swaps the image areas thus replacing the surrounding black frame with images of landscape, and rendering the parts where the interiors are painted in the other two images as black squares. The two-fold approach invites the viewer to imagine the missing, blocked, or denied parts on the canvas, toying with the memory of images, especially in the absence of familiar references, including time and place. Then what makes these particular moments monumental?

The artist poses a similar question in his small-scale sculptures on display. While the Instant series calls for the unpredictable and the intuitive, the ready-made and ‘nature-made’ sculptures present a more calculated gesture from the artist’s side. In works, such as Time to Think, 2014, Fit to Think, 2013, Sleeping Time, 2013, and Le Grand Peigne, 2012, Cavusoglu uses familiar objects, including pieces of broken ceramic, an alarm clock, or an antique mask, and flips their meaning with simple interventions—scrawling a Duchampian signature or flipping the object upside down, making it useless. The artist thus releases the found objects from common use and dislocates the sense of likeness, as he designates new thoughts and interpretations for the possibilities that the objects can carry with themselves.

In “Cinefication,” Cavusoglu shows a selection of single channel videos that also shy away from resolved meanings or definitions. The male character in And I Awoke, 2012, gives clues about what links the films in this room: He is suspended in mid-air, or rather a dark abyss, lying on entangled ropes that merely and defiantly support his body’s weight against gravity. After the moment of awakening and realisation, he starts moving his body—either to break free or to adjust himself to a secure position. The artist changes his camera position continuously, and uses jump cuts to show the character’s twist, move, and struggle with the ropes around him, disrupting the sense of time and space. He thus delays an anticipated resolution or a cathartic ending. As in this work, other films also refrain from constructed narratives or linear temporalities, rather creating a feeling of suspense.

The dark gallery space where Cavusoglu presents his film sequences is set-up and furnished like a film-theatre. He thus choreographs the act of looking at his moving images, which hints at the term “Cinefication” that refers to the government-initiated cinema distribution scheme in the 1920s Soviet Russia. Collectively the veracity of works on display in relation to the conceptual framework and the particular set up of the exhibition emphasize Cavusoglu’s critical view on the current modes of art production and consumption. Moreover, the exhibition acts as a self-reflection about his agency as an artist—what is the gap between the act of making images and the way to present and disseminate them? What are the potentialities that exist in between? 

Labour’s persistence
Suhail Malik
Excerpt from At Home, Wherever, Editor René Block (YKY Publishing, Istanbul, 2011)

Though the landscapes of globalization have by now become an established genre of contemporary art, less familiar is the problem of how to apprehend such landscapes in their making. Made, that is, not just by the large-scale, highly-financed transnational networks that order the systems of globalization and its experience but also by artists and curators in their presentation, reflections and contributions to globalization. And this not in the sense that the contemporary art system is itself a capsule, relatively low-cost version of the globalization wrought by industry, government, commerce, a generalized migrancy, and so on, but in the sense that contemporary art and its presentation proposes images of globalization that do not simply affirm its prevalent logics, manifestations and ideologies (as, say, big-money movies do).

In Modernity at Large (1996) the social theorist Arjun Appadurai proposes that the modernity of globalization - of its unfixed, convergent and divergent spaces, identities, peoples and times - can be figured not as a landscape but as a more general set of ‘scapes’: mediascapes, ethnoscapes, financescapes, technoscapes and so on. ‘Scapes’ are appropriate to grasping globalized modernity because they allow its social imaginary to be articulated in its complexity rather than in the simplified and therefore wrong terms of a coherent logic or unifying narrative. An added complexity is that the imaginary is itself a combination of imagination, images and the imagined, the combination and co-operation (though not convergence) of which allows the complex, interlocking, partial formation of scapes that comprise globalization to be presented with some cogency, even if it has no sense of completion, no end point of its making retroactively giving it sense. That we can still image a world in globalization – that we now have to as an everyday fact and not just as a fantasy or idea – despite or because of its incoherence and extension beyond any unifying capacity to know it is a result of (i) the social imaginary’s always partial capture of globalization’s changing combination of scapes, and (ii) that what is thus captured is itself an irreducibly complex configuration of scapes. Globalization is grasped and spoken of as such, however tenuously, without a cogent metascape holding such images in a fixed formation.

This complexity is the condition of Ergin Cavusoglu’s art, a complexity to which it no less contributes. Often depicting transit as its subject matter – that being one of the most recognized if widely varied phenomena of globalization qua migration, borders, displacement, travel, the peculiar tense placidity of waiting involved in all of this – Cavusoglu’s presentational strategies and mobilization of quasi-confessional or literary narratives consistently ask how the experiences of the transnational order of media, economy, nationhood and belonging, family, romance and thought can continue to make sense when their setting and material conditions are so inextricably caught up with (if they are not in fact constituted by) an elsewhere. This ‘elsewhere’ is not only the subject of Cavusoglu’s art, it is no less intrinsic to it as its material and formal demand, requiring us to be in passage across screens and sounds as the visual and audio images gel with and unwind from one another. Disestablishing a unified, coherent, secured perspective for either the protoganists in Cavusoglu’s art or for the audience that encounters it makes palpable the seams and fractures, the interlocking and co-operation, of the scapes that are the fabric of globalization, a simultaneously forthright-furtive yet conscionable image-experience of its social imaginary, its effects and costs.

More precisely, Cavusoglu reminds us that this global-imaginary is in no way seamless or as fulfilling as its advocates may wish us to believe. It is full of holes, ruptures, unkept rendezvous, forced encounters, demands unmet, desires raised and drained, and so on. And neither is it seamless in the sense of being without exertion or cost in its fabrication and preservation of mobility – be it a movement of trade, money, people, ideas, hopes, crime, weather, conversation…, a generalized condition of transition core to works such as Voyage of No Return (2009), Downward Straits (2004), Tahtakale (2004), and Poised in the Infinite Ocean (2003). That is, even constituted by and as an imaginary - the very term indicating the psycho-eidetic constructions of thought, picturing, words that are at the forefront in Cavusoglu’s art – this work pushes that construction against or into the very terms of its fabrication, towards its abstract and material conditions. And this is right: each scape constituting the globalized imaginary depends on the other to constitute itself, and abstraction and material terms must then be inextricably bound to one another, manifest simultaneously in and for any given scape as they are in the ‘global’ qua their complex totality. Mesmerized by the proto-patriarch’s story of the desolate borderland of an imagined film in Crystal and Flame (2010), for example, or captivated by the same piece’s portrayal of the realization of a dramatic characterization between actors and directors working on a schematized portrayal of the relation between art, commerce and politics, it would be easy to overlook the film of a diamond polisher’s steady hand and studious interest in the object of his craft.  Less pronounced than the other two longer and more dramatically charged, narratively rich elements of the piece, the methodical study of the polishers’ enigmatic skills nonetheless remarks very exactly the hardness of work required for the congregation or co-operation of scapes in and through which diamonds are organized and no less organize the relatively mobile yet meshed material imaginaries of wealth, display, power that shard out from its facets as light also does. Cavusoglu’s forensic close-ups of the polisher’s grinding machinery and surprisingly modest flame exposes clearly enough that the stone’s crystallizing luminescence is an exact if perverse result of the working of the stone’s compacted solidity, the gem’s tensile and surface properties - the material resilience, the refusal of ethereality – being utilized to coax it towards its finished translucent brilliance. That labour is how both light and scapes come to glint resplendently across and through its material depths, the lumpen geological materiality of one interlocked with the centerless abstraction of the other.

It would certainly be too literal to see the demands of work in a diamond’s almost insuperable hardness – not least because the over-riding poetic-reflective imaginary of Cavusoglu’s art proscribes drawing up any such clearly literal determinations. More exactly, it is the demand for work as labour - for work as a production, the generation or extraction of value, goods, time, and so on - that one sees taking place in the polisher’s work. As for the actors with their script and the emotional truth they seek to convey, or the storyteller’s snaring of his listeners with the pathos of a filmic melodrama, the polisher’s labour in Crystal and Flame is calibrated by its material conditions as it is by aesthetic requirements. Literalizing work’s demanding extraction in a diamond’s material and aesthetic qualities would moreover disregard Cavusoglu’s emphatic concentration on the art of the image itself. The dispersed viewing position demanded by the multi-screen and multi-viewpoint presentation, the lateral conversations imbued with historical, literary, metaphorical and allegorical illusion all requires us to move between the different scenes or different shots of the same scene, returning to whichever one makes its demand on us, picking up the story, activity, dramatizaton at an otherwise indeterminate point. There is no right way to see the work, no one story to be heard. Though only a single or several narratives or events may be told or seen in any one of Cavusoglu’s pieces, the single viewpoint is cracked apart, requiring the viewing space or field of vision to be traversed by the eye and ear if not the body as a whole – looking left and right, in front and behind you or even downwards, moving in irregular patters through the installations in attentive response to what is shown. And as much as the eye or ear synthesizes for itself the material-spatial indeterminacy wrought by Cavusoglu’s presentational strategies, the recognition of these images must be no less multi-faceted. While true to their immediately represented dramas and locales, Cavusoglu’s images acknowledge artistic and aesthetic histories extending well beyond the confines of video art and film. Inflected by religious, painterly, poetic and sculptural precedents stretching back centuries, the historical and aesthetic contemporaneity of globalization is again complexified and rendered indeterminate once more. Combined, these interventions on the narrative and image-integrity forbid uniformity or shared congruence in accounting for what is experienced there. Even if it is presented relatively straightforwardly, on a single screen or as a still image, there is always more than one element in the work, again requiring us to bring its constituent parts into a relationship that is not fully if at all explained or organized for us. If, then, the intense labour of image-production taken for granted in highly-mediatized capital-intensive societies is central to Cavusoglu’s own work, the satisfaction given by their filmic richness is here subtended by their loss of narrative control or center in their construction by each viewer. One finds here what could either be a balance or a struggle between the constructive power of the audience and that of the artist. At least, it is an unanswered question in Cavusoglu’s art who has the say in what his art will amount to: the artist, the audience, the protagonists, the otherwise silent workers.

It seems that as with any fine host, granting the audience-guests the primacy of our experience is one of Cavusoglu’s many gifts to us. But really we have no choice in the matter: we must construct his stories ourselves when we encounter his art. The fractured yet generative synthesis it obliges us to make acts as a personal, experiential crystallization of the enmeshed, mobile, transient, assembling and disassembling of the scapes Appadurai identifies. The combining and production of an overall image – the imaginary of this work – does not take place here at the level of the grand mechanisms of finance, media, ethnicity and so on in the general sense Appadurai highlights but in positing the demand and the impossibility of establishing a cogent, uniform and common experience or narrative of what is in fact taking place (if anything at all), of the imaginary of globalization as it is manifest in micro-clashes of labour, transition zones, the failed control of rumination, poetic capture, ‘imagined communities’ (to take up Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase)…. And this brings us back to the persistence of work’s tenacious demand in this art: in Crystal and Flame the telling of a story at a table in the leisurely enjoyment of mastery over one’s relatives returns almost anxiously to the cook’s tremendous if off-hand skill in the preparation of the food and cultivation of the grill’s heat; in Voyage of No Return musings on exile, love or travel in Northern Europe or a Turkish coast are cast against bleak spaces of ports and the terminal cities and towns attached to them, to the clunking machinery of shipping and the legal/illegal import-export it carries; 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. Without explanation, reason or aim to these narratives, labour is exposed as a constant: behind, underneath, permeating through the reflective meditations that depends upon such work but looks to find its meaning elsewhere. But labour’s persistence in Cavusoglu’s art is not confined only to its represented content. It is no less instantiated in the material-aesthetics of the production itself. 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’. Represented and constitutive, labour is a scape that figures in and through the others Appadurai proposes not only because of the imaginary fabricated by those scapes but as that imaginary’s insistent condition and material limitation. To be more precise: labour permeates both the making of the imaginary of globalization in general, the labour that makes tangible the ‘elsewhere’ permeating Cavusoglu’s art, upon which his characters’ and narratives reflect, and no less in the particular imaginary of its here-and-now, of the experience constructed in and by its fractured-saturated fabrications.

These deliberately cracked crystallizations then propose an exactly placed question to the particular, minor version of the global imaginary that is contemporary art itself: can one simply turn one’s back on the labour of production, in the way that Cavusoglu’s protagonists sometimes do, looking instead to the free poetic apprehension and transformation of that labourscape into a meaning that resides beyond them – for example, the viewer taking the place of the poet or the thinker in the films, oblivious to the material realities that permit them their speculative constructions? Or does their material organization require the viewer to remain attuned to the very condition in which their subjective construction finds the space for its own fabrications? What exactly is the relation of these fabrications to the labour that is at the base of the ruminations we seek to conjoin to our own satisfaction? These are not only questions of the global imaginary and to whom it is exposed (its audience); they are also questions as to how that imaginary is made and who is exposed by it. 

Ergin Cavusoglu
Chris Townsend
Excerpt from RAMPA, Istanbul, Editor Basak Senova (RAMPA, Istanbul, 2011)

In contemporary artists’ film and video practices there are, perhaps, two distinctive and contrary approaches. One strategy is to make your work as much like mainstream, or art-house, narrative film as possible, in its look, its sound, in its editing, its attention to story, in its imagination and use of time. Indeed, the artist might even aspire to make their own feature films – as Julian Schnabel, Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood have all done. The other move is to try and remove film from the register of cinema, to redeem it from linear temporality, melodramatic narrative and plot, and spectacular scale. The first tendency I have outlined accords with the general trajectory of art under the aegis of late-capitalism since the mid 20th century, in which the history of art is no longer as significant to the making of art as the history of advertising and popular culture – so that art is nothing more than part of the entertainment industry. The second tendency is, perhaps, the path of a subaltern, dissident art that has inherited the lineage of modernism and its utopian notions of art’s critical responsibilities towards subjectivity and history. Ergin Cavusoglu is amongst the artists who are making this move: in his case turning towards the theatrical and the gestural. 

The narrative feature film uses the theatrical as a narrative code that always produces a particular ending; its typical three-act structure of stasis, disruption and recuperation, inherited from 19th century melodrama within the theatrical circuits that early film replaced, still going strong and powering the economy of entertainment. Cavusoglu isn’t interested in this guaranteed eschatological moment: his concern is with the provisionality of theatre, its procedures of rehearsal and differing interpretations. Where narrative features, and their mirroring products in the world of art, are all about surface, about finish, about a sense of completeness and cohesion, Cavusoglu wants us to see process, incompleteness, the subject coming into being. This is clear in his recent adaptation of Chekhov’s The House with the Mezzanine. Cavusoglu’s film – his “finished piece” – is the rehearsal of Arnold Barkus’s script by professional actors with a director. The work remains definitively unfinished: there is no final and definitive performance, either in the theatre or on film. Nor is subjectivity sealed off as it is in a conventional entertainment narrative; rather Cavusoglu’s rendering leaves identity open, always to be determined. When we look at the role that borders and boundaries play in his work, and given those limits, border crossings, this sense of migration between opposing spaces, and of identity emerging between them, is crucial. And central to The House with the Mezzanine is a tension, typifying that opposition, in which warm sensuality and dry factuality are played out. This establishing of antitheses in the structure of the work is perhaps the defining feature of Cavusoglu’s oeuvre. What is distinctive about it, however, is that he not only sets these relationships up within the filmic narrative, but that he uses them in the physical structure of the installations themselves. Form and content both play roles in establishing possible meanings, rather than the former simply supporting the closed, complete surface of the latter.

Dust Breeding
Ergin Cavusoglu
Text by Sara Raza (The Pavilion, Downtown Dubai, 2011)

The Pavilion Downtown Dubai presents a solo show by Ergin Cavusoglu consisting of a large-scale interactive vinyl perspective floor drawing in Gallery 2. The artwork functions as a manipulation of perception and space and also provides an astute commentary on issues of real estate and labor. 

Contemporary artist Ergin Cavusoglu is renowned for his aesthetically beautiful yet complex film and video installations and sculptural works that explore issues pertaining to post-migration, geographies and informal architectures. Drawing from a highly conceptual and theoretical position Cavusoglu’s practice has been greatly influenced by the work of literature, theatre and iconic artists Marcel Duchamp and filmmaker Robert Bresson, which he has referenced in to create an incongruous meeting of brute reality and slight-of-hand to reflect on the arbitrary order within the classification of art and rationality.

Cavusoglu’s solo exhibition at The Pavilion Downtown Dubai reprises his interests in the ‘Duchampian’ by probing post-object art through showcasing an interactive vinyl perspective floor drawing entitled Dust Breeding. The inspiration behind this work exists within its title, which is borrowed from American photographer and painter Man Ray’s 1920 photograph Dust Breeding of Duchamp's Large Glass with Dust Notes (1921). The photograph was purposely taken after it had collected a year’s worth of dust and debris and marked Duchamp’s year-long residency in New York, where he had met and befriended Man Ray. After the photograph was taken Duchamp cleaned the glass of all dust particles apart from one section, which he permanently fastened on to the glass using a cement solution.
Cavusoglu’s commentary on this iconic Duchamp work draws its reference from the physical and conceptual documentation of dust and debris, which he utilizes to create a form of informal architecture in the form of a perspective drawing based on the notion of a real building that renders the idea of dust and sand as ephemeral and timeless matter.

He re-appropriates this drawing from a three-dimensional architectural model he made as a response to an actual cement factory in Turkey known locally as ‘Noah’. Cavusoglu invites audiences to interact with the work by walking across its entire surface. The routine act of walking disturbs the debris and the rising dust recorded via a security camera, installed at a particular angle, which captures and relays these recordings on to a monitor, which in turn displays surreal images of audiences housed within the three-dimensional sculptural building. Ultimately, Cavusoglu’s artwork functions as a manipulation of perspective and space and also provides an interesting commentary on the vast level of horizontal and vertical expansion of within the UAE addressing issues of disparity within real estate autonomy and the political aspects of labor.

Nermin Saybasili
GESTURING NO(W)HERE
Excerpt from Globalisation and Contemporary Art, Editor Jonathan Harris (Blackwell Publishing, London, 2011)

THE LOCAL IS THE GLOBAL

The processes of globalization are the phenomenon of abstraction. However, what is global, that operates “nowhere”, is always localized; it always inhabits a “now-here”. This instantiations of the global is often structured inside the national. 

In her book Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006), Saskia Sassen has pointed out that much of what we might still experience as the “local” (an office building, a house, an institution in our neighborhood or downtown) is a micro-environment with global span insofar as it is deeply inter-networked. Such a micro-environment is in many senses a localized entity, but it is also part of global digital networks, which give it immediate far-flung span. In his multi-channeled video installation Tahtakale (2004), Ergin Cavusoglu shows us that in a global world the corner of an old city market, as being a landscape of exchanges and flows, can be inflected by the global values, power systems and orders within which it is embedded. Tahtakale is a four-screen video and sound installation, focusing on scenes from the everyday urban environment of an informal, nevertheless hugely significant currency market within the edifice of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. The screens appear to be positioned arbitrarily, scattered around the room, but actually they form a very particular architectural assemblage, which is to guide the viewer through the work. Two of the screens show the daily activities of market traders, dealing with currency and gold by using their mobile phones. Whereas the third screen presents a scrolling text, which depicts the traders’ conversations randomly, the fourth screen shows the hamals (the public porter) carrying goods on their backs to the shops up into the market, pretty much as it has been done for hundreds of years. Since the traders have developed their own sign and verbal language, their activities remain inconspicuous to the general public: 

-I buy all sorts.
-I’ll buy ready.
-Buy for Monday.
-Exact, I’ve got exact Euros.
-Hot, hot simiiiit!
-If the interest is two million per month, fucking multiply it 100.000.
-It’s necessary that the banks load it. And if the interest is 50%?
-You wouldn’t buy dollars this time.
-Euros, is anybody selling Euros?
-Gentlemen, I’m going. What are you saying, it’s ready?
-Ahmet Bey, it’s ready to buy for Friday for tomorrow. 
-I am buying Euros with cash, Euros with cash!
-Exact, I’ve got exact Euros.

The traders perform very private acts in a public space, an alleyway, and on another level the space they occupy becomes a temporal domesticated environment. The volume of their trade often affects the value of the local currency on global scale simply by the deficit or surplus of currency and gold they can create on the market. Global formations therefore occur partly in the micro-spaces of daily life rather than on global level. Even though Tahtakale market is in a location which is very far away from Levent, the financial district of the city, we witness an “economic productivity” of the street environment in the old city close to historic and now touristic sites, such as Hagia Sofia, The Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Palace. 

Unlike any other global cities, Istanbul has always been a world city. As being the biggest mart in the region, merchants and travelers arrived from all over to buy and sell goods: everything could be found in its markets, brought from China, India, Persia, Caucasus, Russia, Egypt, and Syria, and then from the Balkans, Genoa, and Venice, and points to the West. For most of its imperial history, its location made it the largest permanent market place in the area between India and Western Europe. Since Byzantine and Ottoman Empire, Tahtakale has been a trade area as it is located in the Golden Horn, a splendid natural harbor. Today, this historical market, which was called, before the 1980s, “Tahtakale stock market” (Tahtakale borsas?) is still an active, informal trade area that indirectly informs and influences national fiscal policy playing a major role in arranging foreign exchange rate. Known as “ayakl? borsa” (mobile stock exchange), on average some thirty million dollars are traded here everyday. Thus emerges an economic configuration very different from that suggested by the concept of information economy. We recover the material conditions and place-boundedness that are also part of globalization and the information economy.     

Global financial markets inhabit national territories by giving new meanings to what has been known as national in the historical sense. Even though they, as being the electronic market for capital, house significant components of the global, they produce localities by denationalizing the national in specific and partial ways. In this sense, they can be seen as constituting the elements of a novel type of multi-sited territoriality, one that diverges sharply from the territoriality of the historic nation-state. The territoriality that gets instantiated in these centers and localities has been relodged into new organizing logics. Paul Virilio proposes a term in order to conceptualize new global urban space: “glocalization” Virilio uses this term to name the apparent paradox of a mix between the local time of an activity and the global time of generalized interactivity. He points out that “glocalization” 

applies not so much to “multinationals” which are capable of managing their affairs in the two, equally globalized, dimensions of production and distribution, as to this virtual world-city that already contains within itself both the “geographical” centre of the set of real agglomerations it brings together and the “temporal” hypercentre of telecommunications that enable it to exist remotely. This it does, by making itself present to the other cities, thanks notably to the feats of the time-sharing that today supersedes the geopolitical sharing-out of territorial space, since from now on every real city is only ever the remote periphery, the great urban wasteland of this virtual city that rules over it totally, or, better still, “glocally”.         

What Cavusoglu’s work shows us is that Tahtakale is a “glocation”. Through the soundtrack with the combination of Byzantine male choir and animated transactions in dollars and euros, Cavusoglu’s installation disorients center and periphery, global and local, old and new, past and present, here and there. The economic globalization constitutes new geographies of centrality that cut across the old divide of poor versus rich countries, or the global South versus global North divide. There is no longer an authentic locality that can be preserved, no longer a fixed territory that can be bordered. In the globalizing connectivity, “world is a plural condition. There is no one world -only many worlds. Worlds share no single logic, but proliferate as multiple monotheism of retail or trade in a totemic market. They maintain their logics, fictions, and boundaries by limiting and excluding information- remaining righteous and pure”. In these worlds, cities have become a strategic terrain where globalization processes get into concrete, localized forms. The installation hints the fact that the cross-border networks constructs a “transboundary site” where the instantaneous transmission of money around the globe. This instantaneous transmission enables “nowhere” to materialize in “now-here”, when the issue is national territory. This temporal homogenization reflects upon one aspect of globalization: global regimes often “performative” when they enter the national domain. Performativity is about effects and temporal or frequent situations. Cavusoglu’s camera captures the “mobile brokers” talking on their mobile phones. Their presence and conversations allow an action or occurrence to take place. Paul Virilio has pointed out that the world is “temporarily circumscribed by the instant interaction of ‘telecommunications’, another name for [the] sudden confusion of near and far, inside and outside whereby media non-separability deeply affects the nature of the building, the figure of inertia and therefore the morphological stability of reality”. Place is a passage. It is no longer a material for big events that make up the fabric of the landscape, but for small incidents, minute facts. There is a “new primacy of real time over space, of instant interactivity over customary activity.” Through Tahtakale, we witness a certain mode of urbanization: “real time urbanization” thanks to the instantaneous telecommunications. Tahtakale market takes place in “now-here” through the intersections of specific economical and social relations. “Nowhere” is more about time, “now-here” is about space. The “now-here” is the site of a becoming, of a process. Its time is not the linear time, but the time of change in the perpetual present. It is not a localized or particular change but the change of transition and the transitory. But this change has already been programmed. In the age of globalization, life is trapped in an intermediary zone between cyclic and rational. It is made of recurrences, linear and cyclical repetitions.

Dr Brigitte Franzen - Director of the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen
Ergin Cavusoglu
Space: video, exhibition, migration
Artes Mundi 4(Artes Mundi Prize Limited, 2010)

A border crossing between Bulgaria and Turkey provides the starkly austere setting for the 2009 two-screen video installation, Liminal Crossing, a work nonetheless raised to a new plane through its use of two central elements. Firstly, there is the group of people dressed in everyday clothes who are slowly pushing a piano. They are obviously not a professional team from a removals firm loading the instrument onto a truck, but members of a group, a family perhaps, who appear to have lost almost everything apart from the piano. The somewhat harsh setting for this action, the Captain Andreevo border checkpoint, is defined by the colour of a storm, now abating as day slowly turns into night. The tarmac is wet and dotted with numerous big puddles that reflect the golden colours of the sky, the setting sun and the lights: the appearance of the border crossing is characterised by the twilight that marks the liminal point between day and night.

The next obvious step would be to compare Ergin Cavusoglu’s biography with his artistic output. Born in Bulgaria in 1968, he immigrated to Turkey in 1990 following his family’s move to Istanbul in 1989. Cavusoglu has been closely involved with the arts since early childhood, having begun to study art in Sofia before continuing his education in Istanbul and later in London, where he lives today. However, it would be misleading to search his CV for anything more than “possible” reasons or “possible” impulses for certain aspects of his work. His interest in transitional and life-changing situations cannot be entirely traced back to his own personal experiences. We can, however, identify turning points of an epic, political and aesthetic nature and metaphors that directly link his artistic work with the core questions of human existence. Liminal Crossing does not tell a specific story. Instead the power of its imagery is upheld because, on the one hand, the film seems as normal as taking a long look out of a car window while waiting at a border crossing when going on holiday. On the other hand, and to continue with the image, this is not a view that would be forgotten in a hurry, but which would remain long in the memory for the way it completely transforms an otherwise utterly ordinary scene. The piano acts as a sort of trigger for Cavusoglu to make a series of discoveries, starting with the choreography of the characters, the architecture, and the way the border crossing is staged, and leading on to the manifold reflections and the relationships formed through the associations between the trees, the sky, the light. The breathtaking aesthetic power encompassed within this most ordinary of settings is what lends the work such strength, especially when combined with the irony and absurdity of the scene – the start of a new life leading into the night, the protagonists on foot, like pilgrims almost, the slow pace at which the group is only able to shift the heavy instrument while modern cars speed past. 

Pushing pianos
While the act of pushing a piano has been used by artists from Buñuel to Fluxus in a variety of ways to symbolise high culture, Cavusoglu deals with it in his own special way. In Liminal Crossing and the five-screen video installation Voyage of No Return (both 2009), a piano is slowly pushed across the landscape by the protagonists in the film. In other words, the instruments are not depicted inside the walls of a conventional home or as part of the staging for a public event, they are shown out of doors. Nor are they to be found on the short stretch of path between a house and a removal van. Instead, they are seen in what is obviously an unusual place – next to a border crossing or on hilly terrain in the middle of parkland. In both of these works, the piano has been assigned a significant role and is used as a reference to the question of culture in situations of change and transition. This is in Liminal Crossing the very real, oil-soaked tarmac at a border crossing, where the people pushing the piano appear to be members of a family. In Voyage of No Return the transition is more symbolic and surreal despite the idyllic landscape. The piano in this case is only being pushed slowly up a slope by two mute protagonists with a great deal of effort, yet it nevertheless remains a quotation rather than an actual part of the action.

For Turks, the tragic story of the periodic migration of the Turkish minority population from Bulgaria between 1923 and 1991 remains as fresh as ever in the memory, even though it has never become part of the collective consciousness of Western Europe. Following years of aggressive assimilation policies, some 400,000 people were made to flee Bulgaria in 1989 just months before the collapse of the communist regime. Ergin Cavusoglu and his family were part of this wave of migration.  Strange to say, this exodus was scarcely noted, particularly in Germany, due perhaps to the fact that at that historic time the German nation was focusing most of its attention on the incredible events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. But now, 20 years on, Liminal Crossing has taken on an even more explosive effect as a result.

The fact is that Cavusoglu’s biography represents a highly complicated structure of interlinked ideas and artistic works. It only becomes curriculum vitae he shares with many others) in retrospect, where it forms the logical starting point for a wide-ranging artistic oeuvre. His subject matter never appears to have been staged or drawn from newspapers or from the maelstrom of  the media world with its lurid images. Instead it has the authenticity which is characteristic of a real person moving between two different worlds.

Place after Place (2008)
How does this concept, based on the notion of the constantly changing circumstances of our lives and the dynamic situations that bring about those changes, fit into the static nature of Cavusoglu’s sculptural work?
At first glance, Place after Place appears to have little in common with the narrative structures of his films. A nocturnal neon sign providing directions in a temple to a disco? A futuristic communications structure on a street corner? The light-conductive Plexiglas and neon lights in primary colours can also be seen as established elements of pop and neo-pop sculptures, with their deliberate references to the “Deko-shop” aesthetics and the materials from which they are sourced. The references in this case range from Dan Flavin to Isa Genzken. Compared to his films, in Cavusoglu’s sculptures one cannot fail to see either symbols or signposts from which certain information can be gleaned. The viewer is able to find this information on his own, but he does not then have the vocabulary needed to utilise it and the artist certainly does not provide any Instructions for Use. The viewer can be imagined as a figure circling the information before moving on. In the same way, connoisseurs of concrete art may pick up references to numerous representatives of the genre. 

Architecture
Using the multi-screen installations of his film works, Cavusoglu adds fundamental sculptural and architectural elements to the filmic elements. In contrast to video film, in which there is a “best location”, in other words one or more points from which the film is best viewed and listened to in that particular location, the viewer is activated by Cavusoglu. In his four-screen projection, Voyage of No Return (2009) it is possible to stand in front of, behind or within the installation. It is possible to see it all from a standing position, or while walking around or circling it. This gives the viewer the sensation of discovering more about the work than from simply standing in front of it, a feeling enhanced by the fact that after about 15 minutes from the start , it becomes relatively easy to take in and understand. Viewers can remain in front of the work or return to it during their tour of the exhibition, and are thus able to evaluate it in a new way by looking at it from a different angle. The carefully directed sound acts as a major yet invisible guide throughout the space.

As with the two installations referred to previously, in Silent Glide (2008) and Point of Departure (2006) we see transitional situations being created and elements of expectation arising from the interplay between near and far. In various ways, Cavusoglu crosses elements of the silent film movement known as the Kammerspiels with the genre of landscape painting. The care he takes in selecting his actors is in keeping with the high filmic quality of the work and fits seamlessly into the context of the increasingly sophisticated video installations, with their wildly differing content, that have been produced over recent years (works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordon, Arnout Mik, Steve McQueen, Stan Douglas, etc, for example). This type of professionalism, if we want to call it such, is concerned not only with technical advances but also with developments in the art market, and in exhibition practices, where video art is now regarded as a serious genre in its own right. The evolution of the genre can be traced back to the Sixties, when a large number of video films from New York were shot with a single camera that was passed around and shared by groups of artists. These days, videos made by the artists mentioned above, and many others, are  financially viable and technically sophisticated productions. It is no longer the statement or the new medium that is the topic, but the overall image of society.

In these works, the experience of being immersed in the film plays a major role. Apart from the multi-screen projection format, the works also differ from the short film genre, to which they are related, in their use of spaces that have been carefully crafted by the artists. The short film leaves the director and finds a temporary home in more and more uncontrollable black boxes. For Cavusoglu and his colleagues, if the layout and the size of the space in question are not fully defined as part of the installation, they are carefully adjusted to the requirements of each new screening venue. Every time an installation is shown, not only does the artist demonstrate his formal intention, he also continues to   develop it. In this respect, Ergin Cavusoglu defines the dimensions of his projection surfaces and their relationship with the surrounding space with great architectural sensitivity. He plays a special role in this, along with Arnout Mik. Both not only use a multiplicity of screening surfaces and position them next to each other, they also create environments that continue the illusionist space of the film in the real exhibition space. 

The observer stands in the middle and is able to move around freely without having to ask himself how long he needs to remain in a stifling black box. Yes, he could move on but is encouraged to stay by the persuasive power of the work. Thus he finds himself in a setting of which he himself forms a part.

Silent Glide (2008)
This three-screen video installation is based on the major contradiction between the image of a pair of lovers who are parting, and views of the sea populated by freighters and heavy industrial equipment. The motifs of love, longing and the sea are looked at in a fractured manner. The concentration on the faces of the lovers and their lovely surroundings are at visual odds with the apparent conflict in what they are saying to each other. The same is true of the marine scene, which at first glance might look like a holiday snap or a picture of an ideal place to live in where the changing light constitutes a special feature. But the ships and the industrial equipment that Cavusoglu brings into view counteract the equation whereby the sea equals leisure or freedom. And yet in spite of these conflicts and contradictions, the viewer still basically feels good when he is watching the film. It is only the failure to resolve the contradictions inherent in what we are looking at that enables us to recognise that what we are watching is a depiction of our own reality.

Discussing another film by Cavusoglu, Melissa Gronlund wrote: “The video (There is No Road) addressed Romanticism by running it into the ground – letting it tire itself out on its own loop of rehearsal, steadily losing climatic and symbolic potential in an ever-growing build-up of constraint and claustrophobia.” (Frieze, April 2009). Thus she refers to the fractured Romanticism in his work which creates a glimpse into an unattainable and unattained far-off place in which private and political lives repeatedly jostle against each other in different ways. 

The scent of romance is at first gratefully received by the viewer only to be questioned a little later by the density of the dialogue and the images, holding up, as they do, a mirror to the educationally elite to show them their own self-constructions of the absurd, of near and far, of home and adventure, of bonds and freedom.

Point of Departure (2006)
This complex six-screen installation combines the central notions of modern transit and travel with the experiences, faces and gestures, of two travellers who are subject to some form of control as they pass through an airport. Cavusoglu’s control point consists of subjective impressions and technical images, its architecture appearing to open up a path along which it is not possible to travel any further. In this respect the work reflects the interplay between wide-ranging visual impressions and personal perceptions in the form, not only of the expectations, but also the fears associated with travel.  The travellers’ innermost thoughts are compared with projections from an X-ray luggage scanner (which they cannot directly see as they move through the airport). We see the faces of the protagonists as they are exposed to the pressures of having to conform to this environment. Airports are quintessentially non-places (as defined by Marc Augé), associated with a certain understanding of rites of passage by which modern man is naturally characterised.

Actors 
Cavusoglu is just one of a range of contemporary video artists who use professional actors in their works. This rapprochement with the genres of theatre and narrative film has grown ever stronger since the mid 1980s. For some artists this has led to their drawing on the fame of actors in the same way as a Hollywood film might do in a bid to ensure that their work attracts special attention. The use of actors also appeals to a viewing habit ingrained in both cinema audiences and in particular television audiences. The actor lends a naturalness to the part that enables us to accurately read what lies within the easily-decipherable story and the repeated, identical, formats in which they appear. We are unable, however, to simply immerse ourselves in the film and forget that we are watching actors in Cavusoglu’s installations. Despite the naturalness of the settings and the credibility of the costumes, their figures remain stage-bound or, to put it another way, they are closer to Greek tragedy than they are to the Actors’ Studio. The interesting thing about this is that after watching a Cavusoglu installation, we wouldn’t immediately say that such or such an actor had performed well, as we might when leaving the cinema, for example. The figures in his installations remain architectural parts of his constructions, not part of the foreground.

Home
For Cavusoglu, “home” evolves.  In this context, for him “home” is a world that we take as our own, a place that in certain circumstances, and somewhat to our surprise, we discover - from just a change of anthropological proximity or density of view – to be very big (Quintet Without Borders, Tahtakale) and that astonishes us with its possibilities of distance (Poised in the Infinite Ocean, Downward Straits). In these works he takes us right to the limits of cliché, looking, for example, at a massive range of stereotypes ranging from the monetary black market in Tahtakale, which he sees from the point of view of a documentary, to the dramatically-constructed conversation between the typically British father-son protagonists of Voyage of No Return. Changes in culture are another important aspect of his work. His films depict ubiquitous scenes yet at the same time keep their distance. They are at once both specific and general, often depicting great natural beauty. These are rural yet urban settings. To a certain extent they are different places. The typical characteristic of cities is the surprising proximity to people and stories such as those shown in the episodic film. But then there is also the scenic quality of the vastness that Claude Lévy Strauss felt in his “Tristes Tropiques” with his view of New York, a city he described as a mighty rocky mountain range created by man.

Prof Tim Cresswell
fast forward 2 The Power of Motion, Media Art Sammlung Goetz (Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany 2010) 

Downward Straits

Ships move, ghostlike, between two shores. Some of these ships carry oil. Some carry containers full of the things we consume. The two shores are often cast as the shores of Europe and Asia. They are the shores of the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul. It is night time. We can see lights across the waterway. Some of the shots are from one shore and some from the other. The ships move both ways – right to left and left to right. There dark hulls and superstructures move across the lights of the other continent, momentarily blacking them out. All of this is happening on four large screens that the viewer is invited to walk through and engage with. The viewer is mobile like the ships, looking right and left as we negotiate our own passage. We hear sound too. The sounds of radio transmissions concerning the regulation of maritime mobilities. Ships are the vehicles that make the world work. They seem unremarkable: invisible even. Ships are old. Almost as old as humanity. They move across the earth’s surface relatively slowly. They do not attract the attention of the theorists. But the vast majority of the world’s “stuff” moves on ships.
Ships are part of the infrastructure of mobility that hides what it is that is moving. Shipping containers are piled high on thousands of ships as they cross the world. They accumulate, however briefly, in massive container ports. Then they move on trains and on trucks from port to warehouse and from warehouse to shops. The vast majority of things that travel the world do so on ships yet they remain remarkably invisible. When we see shipping containers we have no idea what it is inside. The particular mobilities of the container and the ships that carry them rely on their blankness, their invisibility. This invisibility enables the smooth operation of capitalism. It is at the centre of our everyday lives without us even noticing. But there is another side. Any number of TV police dramas uses the container as a site of unwanted ingress, of disease, of weapons or of people labeled illegal. Their blankness is both the source of their efficiency and a source of threat and doubt. There are 300 million containers circulating the world now.  Their apparent innocuousness is a deliberate consequence of the modern logistical imperative to standardize movements, to abolish stillness as much as possible. It is this linking of visibility, standardization and routinisation that global commodity movements are predicated on. This linking attempts to produce stability and predictability and, in turn, invisibility. 
Downward Straits reflects on this largely invisible, mundane, passage of things across the seemingly contourless, borderless waters of the world. These ships only become visible as a kind of absence: the ship-shaped blankness that we perceive as the dim silhouettes of ships pass across the lights of the thoroughly coded landscapes of Europe and Asia. Here the thin passage of water acts as a liminal zone where mobility is juxtaposed with the seeming certainties of the hard, borderline landscapes that form the shores. The ship is a place outside of place. As in much of Cavusoglu’s work, a mysterious entanglement of place and mobility occurs asking us to confront the ways in which they make and undo each other.

Poised in The Infinite Ocean

Across three video screens a story unfolds. Night descends. A lighthouse flashes its warnings across an increasingly wild sea. A large old house stands against the storm. A city shuts itself up as the elements rage. Out on the ocean, in the midst of the storm, a ship sails towards its doom. We know this because we hear a narration concerning a ship making its way through the Bay of Biscay. This is the south west coast of France. Near Biarritz. The narration tells us of an old, un-seaworthy cargo ship making its way north to the bay and getting caught in a storm. This storm. We hear of the ship slowly falling apart. We do not see it. The images are full of impending doom. 

Images of place and mobility pervade this piece. The chateau seems solid and homely. It is easy to imagine a large family inside curled up and safe. Or perhaps the family has left and this large space is now the home for a single elderly person rattling around the too-large space. The city too seems well protected against the storm. The lighthouse is a fixed point in space. Its metronomic signal tells the sailors and ships to stay away. This is a dangerous point for them. There are rocks just under the fluid turbulence of the water. Against these fixities we know the ship is moving. It has moved from the south. It contains stories that transcend space among its cargo. And yet the ship is also a place. Places are supposed to be richer, more profound, versions of locations. But having a location does not mean being still. A ship has a location. Now a GPS system would be able to tell us where it was. But not then. This moving location is also a moving place. Particular forms of sociality mark ship life. Levi-Strauss told us this on his journey to Latin America. Malinowski noted the boat born placeness of the Melanesian sea-farers. Foucault described the “ship of fools” as a special place – a heterotopia, or place outside of place that is both sealed from the world and yet part of the “infinity of the sea” – the Infinite Ocean. As the narrator reminds us,  the ship “is something of a fantasy, floating free of the realities at sea.” In recent years we have seen ships act in this way. As places for the extraordinary, the fantastic, outside of the normal territorial definitions of what belongs and what does not belong. Garbage ships have crossed the world full of the crap of civilization, looking to unload their toxic cargos in the marginalized places of the developing world. Ships full of refugees have sailed the Mediterranean and the Pacific looking for a way in to more secure worlds. Ships have anchored at sea, just beyond the jurisdictions of nation-states offering tax-free cigarettes and abortions. Ships can be marginal places. But ships are also the instruments of normality. They are the lifeblood of the modern world system. They carry the stuff we consume. They carry oil to keep us moving. Ships of navies still patrol the seas demanding conformity, policing borders and imposing the will of the mighty on others. 

Ships and the sea then are fluid places. They do not conform to the hard certainties of land. They are both beyond place and places in and of themselves. They are spaces where we are able to project our fantasies of freedom. A world of pirates and permanent transgression. Yet also the places of slavery, of trade, of the regulation of the world and the imposition of order. 

The sense of the sea as an outlaw space is necessary to construct its other. The space of home. Home is firm and bounded. Its rootedness forms a site of attachment. In Poised in The Infinite Ocean Cavusoglu works with this world of presence and absence. The home of the chateau and the home of the city seem snug and enclosed. Spaces of stable identity and familiarity. They do so because of the wildness of the sea and the storm. Without the calamitous ocean these places would be less homely. Similarly the unfolding story of the other place – the heterotopic ship would seem less otherworldly if it were not for the reassuring stabilities of landlocked homes. At the same time the places we see – the homes of the city and the chateau become ship-like. The story of the ship out there is told as we see homes bound tight against the weather. These homes will not sink but the threat is there. We can imagine being bound in the ship, hemmed in by the Infinite Ocean. The home seems singular and specific – a point in an Infinite world that is stretched forever in all directions. And the home (whether the ship-home or the house-home) gets its power through its contrast with the unknowability of infinity –the space Aristotle called kenon – the void of nothingness. 

A question for artists is how to record a world torn between place and motion. On the one hand there is the possibility of using art to resist a mobile world. To insist on the value and authenticity of place. To establish roots. On the other hand there is the possibility of denying place. Of reveling in a world in motion where nothings stays anywhere for very long. The magic of Cavusoglu’s work is its refusal to embrace either of these easy extremes. Instead, much of Cavusoglu’s work meditates on the notions of place and mobility as they interrelate and give each other meaning. He appears to be perpetually caught in a world on the move, on the sea, in airports, in the places of the migrant. Spaces such as these are key spaces in the modern world. The world has always been one of both roots and routes. But now this tension is becoming ever more evident. Issues of migration may be among the most important of our age,. Governments act in reactionary ways to make the place of the nation more like a fortress. Meanwhile the outsiders, the strangers, the foreigners are stuck in movement, on the margins, in The Infinite Ocean. Their places are precarious. In the margins of the cities, under the highways, in vegetable trucks crossing continents. At the same time a kinetic elite inhabits a carefully regulated space of flows – the airport lounge, the business centre and the first class cabin. As a Turk, brought up in Bulgaria, living in London he inhabits in-between spaces. This is reflected in this world of homes formed, however precariously, in a mobile and sometimes threatening world. Non-places are inhabited. A particular kind of authenticity comes form the ability to inhabit many worlds with some degree of comfort. Some places are doomed, such as the ship that is poised in The Infinite Ocean. Some places are safe for now. But danger always seems to be only deferred, not defeated.

Felicity Lunn
Excerpt from Place after Place, Monograph (Kunstverein Freiburg, 2008)

Ergin Cavusoglu's work is always both an investigation and a construction of space. His multi-screen video installations, the prime medium in which he works, separate and recombine the places he films and exhibits in. As a result, we find ourselves exploring these places from a variety of perspectives, as if we ourselves were moving through them – and simultaneously reading them as abstract formal configurations. Ergin Cavusoglu's exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg enhanced these characteristics. A former 1930s swimming pool, consisting of a large hall and a first floor mezzanine gallery, the building was a perfect match for the artworks it housed. Allowing views onto the hall from the upper level and from one side of the gallery across to the other, the architecture reflected and emphasised the simultaneity of time and place inCavusoglu's work. Just as he exploits the moving image in order to express the fragmented nature of contemporary reality, in which  our minds and bodies are exposed to parallel experiences, the setting for this exhibition demanded our simultaneous perception of various works and the connections between them.

The fundamental premise for the exhibition was the wish not only to juxtapose Cavusoglu's most complex video installation to date (Point of Departure, 2006) with his newest two-channel video (Silent Glide, 2008), but also to present the videos alongside a luminous sculpture and a selection of large scale drawings. Although video remains at the heart of Cavusologu's practice, he is paying increasing attention to the sculptures and drawings that explore in other ways the themes and conceptual concerns inherent to his work with the moving image, and the processes of image-making in general. 

The principle theme informing Ergin Cavusoglu's practice is that of notions of and attachment to places, and the different modes of mobility that have in the last few decades so fundamentally changed the way we live. This investigation is influenced by the artist's own experience of growing up as part of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, of moving to Istanbul and subsequently to London to study. The protagonists of his video installations reflectCavusoglu's movement, both physical and intellectual, between cultures, their stories inextricable from the places of transit – airports, harbours, train stations – in which they are set. 

Point of Departure
The key work in the exhibition was the six-screen video projection, Point of Departure. Filmed in the airports of Stansted in England and Trabzon on the Turkish Black Sea - what Cavusoglu has termed „the end points of the European idea“ - the presentation in Freiburg, at the heart of the old Europe, endowed the piece with a sense of drama, the impression that the airport as the ultimate theatrical setting was extended in the airiness of the exhibition spaces. Installed towards the back of the Kunstverein's large, open hall, the work was immediately visible from the entrance, drawing the visitor through the real space of the exhibition to the virtual, envelopping space of the filmed sequences. The imposing Kunstverein architecture, the gate-like construction of the six screens and the juxtaposed airport environments combined to create an expanded spatiality that dissolved the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, documentary and fiction. 

Point of Departure is loosely structured around the journeys of two individuals, a male, Turkish researcher from Trabzon to Stansted and a female, English journalist from Stansted to the east. Although they meet by chance and he helps her with the translation of a letter she needs at her destination, the plot is less a complete story than a construct to draw attention to the details of their different environments. Like allCavusoglu's work, Point of Departure is a meticulously edited collage of perspectives that, whilst reflecting the multi-faceted character of modern reality, are structured so that each of the six viewpoints is clearly coded. While the two outer screens show close-ups of the actors as they are processed through the airports, the inner screens focus on the work of the staff. The middle screen almost exclusively shows footages from a bird's-eye view, (The middle screen is occupied almost exclusively by bird's-eye views,) as if filmed by surveillance cameras, and the x-rayed contents of luggage flow continuously across the floor area in front. Although the piece starts with both airports at dawn – like stages waiting to be occupied by the actors – the work is non-linear, sometimes showing the same character in both airports simultaneously. The chaos of airports is conveyed but also contained within an ordered structure so that, for example, fragments of conversation between customs officers and the two travellers define the latters' journeys. Like the security x-ray, the actors are always in motion without ever arriving as though travel were a permanent state; also required to walk round and through the screens, the viewer must also navigate the many points of view. Although this emulates the contemporary experience of taking in multiple visual impressions at once,Cavusoglu also draws consciously on the cinematic idiom of simultaneity. In connection with this, it is perhaps no coincidence that his early studies were in the medium of wall painting, a means of creating an image with a clear temporal chronology and developing narrative, as well as becoming an element within an architectural structure.

The jewel-like colours of the 'painterly' abstract image of the x-ray machine at the visitor's feet are an important aspect of the installation in enhancing the warm brown and orange tones that Cavusoglu chose for shots of Trabzon and the cooler blues and greens of Stansted. This distinction between colours is only one aspect of the particular constellation of carefully constructed details from which the specificity of place is developed in the work. Although airports worldwide share the same processes and machinery and are marked by a similar 'poetics of space', the viewer of Point of Departure gradually becomes aware of differences between the two in terms of dress, physionomy and language. It is these distinguishable identities that map out the vast tracts of the earth's surface that lies between Stansted and Trabzon, conceptualising movement in both time and place from one to the other. The man and the woman are the privileged travellers of the European middle classes, whose education bridges cultural difference. Their individual stories are set, however, against the scenes of large groups of collective travel, though we cannot be sure whether this involves migration or merely business and tourism.Cavusoglu distils this backdrop of social and cultural forces through the rituals of air travel that involve specific processes, sequences and rhythms. 

Place after Place
As distinct as possible from the realism and narrative framework of Point of Departure, with which it shared the hall, Ergin Cavusoglu's new sculpture, Place after Place was made for the exhibition in general and as a coda to the video installation specifically. Placed off-centre to break the symmetry of the Kunstverein, the combination of light, colour and spatial form translated the main abstract components of the moving image into an object. The impulse to look into the work in order to understand its structure directly echoed the luminous colour of the central x-ray image in Point of Departure. Basing the dimensions of the three perspex cubes, fitted one inside the other, on the 16:9 ration of the widescreen cinema image, Cavusoglu expanded in this work his ideas concerning place. Just as importantly, the axis of light functioned as a beacon of stillness next to the constant motion of Point of Departure, directing its prismatic beams outwards towards the other works in the exhibition. Place after Place forms a connection between, in particular, the videos and the drawings: while the videos are immaterial, colourful and time-based, the drawings are static, black and white and created from the tangible materials of ink and paper. The sculpture, on the other hand, brings together in one object, although static, the immaterial light of the videos and the materiality of the real (the perspex).

Silent Glide
Displayed over two screens, Silent Glide is structurally less fragmented than Point of Departure. Nevertheless, the tightly constructed relationship – both formally and thematically - of each pairing of scenes results in a more intense intertwining of the lyrical with the banal. The first work of Cavusoglu's to be filmed in a private, domesticated space, it is also about movement and displacement. There are two main characters in the film. He came to Hereke for a few months and has stayed for two years; she comes for a short visit from the city to try to persuade him to return. His search for rootedness, identification with a place contrasts with her professional, nomadic lifestyle. Juxtaposing the story of the couple's deteriorating relationship in primarily interior shots on the left-hand screen with views of the town and harbour of Hereke on the right, Cavusoglu constructs a constant shift between individuals and place, interior and exterior, motion and stillness. More clearly a story than Point of Departure, this newer work is also more emphatically underpinned by metaphor – the model of a ship that is shown upturned as the relationship ends, the comparison of an intricate carpet pattern with the vagaries of life and the brooding industrial landscape mirroring the relationship turned sour. The male character's failure to finish the book he came to Hereke to write is pitted against his obsession with his current reading of Tolstoy's memoires, A Confession. He uses the great writer's thoughts on the meaning of life to support his own disillusionment with the banality of his former life and his need for the reality he sees in the spiritual strength of the workers from the local cement factory, the largest in Europe.   

Even more clearly than in Point of Departure, the viewer is aware in Silent Glide of the sediment of history beneath the contemporary. Where the ancestral city gates are replaced by airport security gates in the earlier work, Hereke's former fame as the centre of silk carpet production is alluded to here by a scene showing silk reels and weaving looms in   the town's last surviving workshop. The male character's reading of Tolstoy is followed by the ring tone of his mobile phone, collapsing past and present, the aesthetic and the mundane into one glimpse into the complexities of the modern world. This synthesising of time is also explored formally in a scene in which the female character stands on an empty railway platform at night. with the passage of a fast train simultaneously the camera starts tracking behind her and after the train has passed, we see her standing on the opposite platform. At the same time the second screen presents the already projected image of herself on the opposite platform. When he tells her that he likes to count the car lights at night on the bridge and she copies this alone in a later scene, the image of light and dark becomes loaded with the sadness of this one remaining connection between them. This is, ironically, mediated by the very landscape that has pulled them apart. 

Midnight Express
The glimpses of romanticism in the two video installations -  the early morning mist on the runway in Point of Departure and the sunlight playing on the sea in Silent Glide – is given full reign in the third video work to be shown in the exhibition, Midnight Express, 2008. More readily associated with a certain poetry of speed and movement than airports and aeroplanes, trains also acquire a sense of mystery when shown hurtling through unrecognisable landscapes at night. Continuing the theme of migration between east and west, the trains that at varying intervals pass each other in the night were filmed on the railway track used for the Orient Express. Projected directly onto the wall above the entrance to the Kunstverein, only the flickering lights and whooshing of the trains, interspersed with a few seconds of daytime shots, drew the subject matter out of the abstraction. The darkness in this work shifts the viewer from the specifics of location to the imaginative potential of the liminal space and the ghostly image. The tone and image were separated by the entrance door so that, echoing reality, the visitor to the exhibition experienced the sound of the trains, installed in the porch, before the visual image in the hall. Indeed, immediately attracted by the drama of Point of Departure at the back of the space, it was only on turning away to move to the floor above that the viewer became aware, as if out of the corner of their eye, of the subliminal image of Midnight Express. 

Drawings
While the blocks of colour, abstraction and formal rigour of the sculpture provided a means of interpreting the conceptual framework of the videos, the eight drawings shown in the exhibition gave an entirely different perspective, through other materials and themes, on Cavusoglu's primary medium. Produced as another means of expressing the same memories or impressions and not as either preparatory sketches or storyboards for the videos, the large-scale drawings in pen and ink could nonetheless be both for, depicting figures or objects in movement or traces of passage, they are moments within a larger story. A tennis ball rolls from one side of the paper to the other, a tyre track forges a graphic pattern, a man marks his name among other Turkish names on a wall in negative by erasing over a blackened patch. The drawings both look back to earlier works and forward as possible starting points for new video installations. Executed evenly across the paper in lines of equal width, they recall the sobriety of architectural drawings and the clarity of illustration. Like the videos themselves, these works are deliberately unemotional and distanced: although they directly reflectCavusoglu's personal experiences, his wish is for these to be conveyed objectively enough to have collective meaning. This reserve in the work recalls a topographical map that in the place of geographical places marks out mental histories.

Conclusion
The constellation of works as well as the presentation of the exhibition Place after Place in Kunstverein Freiburg highlighted a number of key aspects of Ergin Cavusoglu's practice. His subject matter – time taken up with traveling movement, transition and ephemerality, the expansiveness of airport architecture, the endless ocean and the way in which works of art occupy and transform space – is based on an existential idea of open, limitless and mobile space. This absence of closure also informsCavusoglu's positioning of the viewer as passengers of 'events in progress'. His work investigates how the history of cultures can go beyond times and borders and the ways in which cultural change affects the individual. He demonstrates that airports are not 'non-places', as they are sometimes described, but are rather specific and abstract simultaneously. Indeed the openness of his videos allows them to be infected by the places they are shown in, the details of each enhancing and expanding the other. It is also the precision of detail in Cavusoglu's work that shows travel not as an equalising force but as constructing difference: „about the intersection and collision of multiple experiences of place“. In Point of Departure the main characters are brought together by chance, while wanderlust tears the couple apart in Silent Glide. In the Kunstverein the visitor's experience of these two works affected the subsequent reading of Midnight Express as both abstract and real, as the light and marks left by the trains carrying individuals with their own myriad reactions from inside the carriages to the darkness, noise and movement.  

In marked contrast to the fragmented structure of Cavusoglu's work, the Kunstverein's architecture provided one standpoint from which every piece in the exhibition could be seen at the same time. At the far end of the hall, on the gallery level, it was possible to look down into Point of Departure, directing ones gaze via Place after Place below and the drawings above to Silent Glide at the other end of the mezzanine. The works, their themes and the environment they were placed in became both object and stage.

Claire Doherty
Landscapes of Mobilities
Excerpt from Places of Departure, Monograph (Film and Video Umbrella and Haunch of Venison, 2006) 

Amongst the photographic souvenirs of my family’s recent past is a rather odd portrait of my brother and me. We’re dressed in our school uniforms and I must be about eight, which would make my brother eleven. We’re resting on a luggage trolley which displays the notice ‘London Heathrow’ and we bear the world-weary expressions of passengers in transit. And yet we weren’t travelling nor were we meeting anyone who was travelling.

This is a production still. We were extras on the set of the film International Velvet, a 70s sequel to the somewhat more memorable National Velvet with teenage diva Tatum O’Neal replacing Elizabeth Taylor as the equine heroine. The set was Stansted Airport, which in 1978 had yet to undergo Norman Foster’s transformation. Its fate as London’s third airport was announced the following year. I remember it as no more than an airfield bunker. Inside it had been dressed as Heathrow’s International Terminal – the site of O’Neal’s homecoming on winning her Olympic gold. In the late 70s, airports were still perceived as sites of privileged mobility, though the onset of low-cost travel had been signalled by the Laker Skytrain in 1977. The combination of film set and fictional jet-set led in this case to the performing of privilege, though mobility was strangely impotent. The ‘jet-setting’ was practiced through a series of exits and entrances that led ‘backstage’, an endless cycle of identical welcomes and farewells, all for a cinematic fragment that lasted only 50 seconds in the final cut. 

Stansted Airport in this photograph is not immediately recognisable as the place of Marc Augé’s “fleeting, temporary and ephemeral” encounters or Iain Chamber’s “collective metaphor of cosmopolitan existence where the pleasure of travel is not only to arrive, but also not to be in any particular place” This was a particular place. A materially evident place of intersections between real and imagined experiences and histories, political and economic relations, grounded in a mapped location, as Simon Harvey indicates, 51?53’N, 0?14’E. This was, and was not, an airport. We were in, and out, of place. 

Standing in Ergin Cavusoglu’s complex and multi-layered representation of Stansted and Trabzon, I have the same sense of disorientation rooted in the materialities and characteristics of those airports. Some 28 years later, the Stansted of Cavusoglu’s film still operates as a stage-set on which both spontaneous and scripted, real and imagined narratives are played out for the camera, and yet of course this Stansted is now the intersection of a new set of economic and political relations, with the aspirations of 70s airtravel giving way to the anxiety of mobilities and migration in a post 9/11 world. 

To associate Cavusoglu’s mesmerising video installations merely with the conventions of non-place and to view his work solely through the prism of migration between East and West, would be to miss his engagement with the details that make up specific places in space and time. Reviewers refer consistently to the poetic and lyrical qualities of his work and to his ability to transcend the documentary in favour of something less tangible, less illustrative. Cavusoglu’s compositional approach suggests the artist is not interested in replicating the experience of the everyday, either as Michel de Certeau has discussed, from the totalising viewpoint of above, nor from the “oblivion” of the street. Rather, I believe him to be intrigued by the representation and remaking of place as understood by geographer Tim Cresswell as, “an event marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence…in a constant sense of becoming through practice and practical knowledge”. To think about how and what these video installations signify about place, we need to begin by considering what we understand by the term ‘place’ itself.  

In the 1970s, the work of human geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph posited a bounded notion of place, a moral converse to the rootlessness of mobility. Relph suggested,
”Roads, railways, airports, cutting across or imposed on the landscape rather than developing within it, are not only features of placelessness in their own right, but, by making possible the mass movement of people with all their fashions and habits, have encouraged the spread of placelessness well beyond their immediate impacts.”
This essentialist theorising of place, characterised as “sedentarist metaphysics” by anthropologist Liisa Malkki, can be seen to have been destabilised through the postmodern philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault in the 1980s and by cultural theorists such as James Clifford and Edward Said in the 1990s. For Said, mobility and migration mark out the places of the modern age: 
“For surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts. As the struggle for independence produced new states and new boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging structures of institutional power, rejected by the established order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness.”

And for Clifford, 
"For better or worse, diaspora discourse is being widely appropriated. It is loose in the world, for reasons having to do with decolonization, increased immigration, global communications, and transport -- a whole range of phenomena that encourage multilocale attachments, dwelling, and traveling within and across nations."

Forced and voluntary mobility was occurring in the post-modern world, by what David Harvey has referred to, as unparalleled “time-space compression” in light of the expansion of telecommunications and transport routes. The politics of mobilities and the diasporic condition came to dominate visual art and culture in the 1990s, yet, as Cresswell suggests, with the proliferation of “nomadic metaphysics” came a 
“formalist, postmodern tendency to overgeneralize the global currency of the so-called nomadic, fragmented and deterritorialized subjectivity”. 
The problem with mobility, Cresswell argues, “is that it may serve to “decontexualise and flatten out difference as if we were all in fundamentally similar ways always already travellers in the same postmodern universe, the only difference residing in the different itineraries we undertake.”

So how do such nomadic metaphysics relate to Cavusoglu’s work? By reading his landscapes of mobility and exchange – the port, the airport, the market, the station – simply as signifiers of the globalised flow of social relations, we are in danger of erasing the gendered, racial and social differences. Essentially we may forget about the power relations that are brought to bear on these gateways that distinguish one passenger, worker, tourist and refugee from another. Let’s take Tahtakale, 2004 as an example.  

This four-screen video installation presents a crowd of men trading in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. An adjacent screen of scrolling text reports translated excerpts of their conversations on mobiles and cried out to each other. They are trading in currency and gold. The atmosphere is frenzied, yet informal. Tahtakale is distinguished from Cavusoglu’s other recent work by its intensity of focus and energy. There are no establishing panoramic or tracking shots here, but rather the artist embeds his camera in the crowd. It is here in Tahtakale that Turkish fiscal policy is set, economic relations are played out through the haggling techniques of the market. We could read Tahtakale as the representation of an historic site-specific practice which imbues the Grand Bazaar with its sense of the local. Or we could see the proliferation of mobile phones, the absence of traded objects and the westernised clothes of the traders as indications of Tahtakale as a deterritorialised zone. But of course the work is intent on the collision of both essentialized place and globalization (particularly through the soundtrack with the combination of Byzantine male choir and animated transactions in dollars). This work offers us a more progressive notion of place – one that is gendered (the artist intentionally immerses the viewer in the machismo of the transactions); practiced and performed (Tahtakale only occurs through the intersections of specific social and economic relations) and defined by conflict. Tahtakale is the event in progress theorised by geographer Doreen Massey back in 1993, in her ground-breaking article A Global Sense of Place. Massey proposed that, “what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations”. We see this response to place develop through Cavusoglu’s recent multi-screen installations structurally, formally and conceptually.  

The artist is still intrigued by the liminal spaces of the city that formed the subjects of his earlier single-screen works Impasse, Street Dance and Mountain Bike. Yet his use of multiple large-scale projections now fractures the single-point perspective, so that the installations envelop the viewer. This formal structure serves to heighten a sense of spatial displacement, but also alludes to the cinematic – whereby the projections act as split screens in a narrative from multiple perspectives. 

Poised in the Infinite Ocean, 2004 and Downward Straits, 2004 utilise this formal structure to exploit the darkness across the screens. Architectural details are obscured, recognisable figures are absent, ships become shadows and the blackness of the water is set against the illumination of the buildings. 

In Downwards Straits in particular, Hagia Sofia, Ortaköy Mosque and Kuleli Barracks – the institutions of church and the military - provide a static backdrop to the automated movement. The staccato wireless radio broadcasts and lapping waves cut into the solitude of the vistas set up between the screens. Michel Foucault famously declared,
“…the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilisation.. the greatest instrument of economic development…but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.”

The narration of Poised in the Infinite Ocean, captures this somewhat romantic notion of the ship as heterotopia, whilst the illuminated buildings acts as anchor points or nodes in the networks of movements through the Bay of Biscay. Cavusoglu experiments with darkness in both of these installations to shift the subject from the specifics of locations to their imaginative potential. The narrative cohesion of Poised in the Infinite Ocean gives way in Adrift, 2006 and Point of Departure, 2006 to a more complex multi-layering of time, mobilities and locations. 

Adrift moves away from allusions to film noir towards observational montage which nevertheless still retains a certain unease. As far as I can tell there is no significant connection between Cavusoglu’s choices of locations here – Centraal Station in Antwerp and Carnegie Hall in New York, along with the outer neighbourhoods of the cities and Rhode Island. But the lack of a distinct narrative is important. The artist sets up a series of vignettes: the view of the skyline out of the train windows bumps and flickers with the movement of the carriage; the scale of people shifts from the miniature static figures of the architect’s model to the on-lookers who simultaneously move around and within Louis Delacenserie’s Centraal Station; a man in a yellow souwester jet-sprays the spindles of a external staircase inch-by-inch; gated mansions roll past echoing the architectural model; a disenfranchised figure sits by  the roadside; a boy ‘monkey-swings’ on the scaffolding built around Carnegie Hall; stop-don’t-walk signs blink; a Buddha shines through an illuminated doorway; a shaky camcorder captures a descending jet plane. These are the connections Cavusoglu makes for us between the performing of place in these locations. It is impossible to see these representations without thinking about how the spaces of the city and its environs are coded; how and where transgressions and interventions occur. And how the artist let’s us see these spaces at one remove. The camera angles in Adrift are notable – the interchange from a window across the street, the skyline from inside a moving train, the sea from a boat. Cavusoglu positions us as passengers afforded glimpses of these events in progress. As Massey suggests, 
“People’s routes through the place, their favourite haunts within it, the connections they make (physically, or by phone or post, or in memory and imagination) between here and the rest of the world vary enormously. It is now recognised that people have multiple identities then the same point can be made in relation to places. Moreover, such multiple identities can either be a source of richness or a source of conflict, or both”

It’s the artist’s astute use of two musical notes in the score for Adrift that, when repeated consistently for the entire duration of the work, create that sense of unease. The expectancy of the discordant combination becomes increasingly unbearable as the notes never reach their final resolution. Combine that base tone with alarm bells and the movement of trains back and forth and you have a piece which relishes its uneasy indeterminate state – an aural and filmic transito.  

Cavusoglu is not interested in private, domesticated spaces, but rather in the intimate moments which lay claim to public space. The landscapes of mobility – the roads, railways, airports of Edward Relph’s placelessness – are public and somewhat anonymous. For Cavusoglu, these spaces offer the opportunity to think about how identities are constructed through social and material interactions for people and for places and how in turn these might affect the viewer in other spaces. 

Point of Departure, 2006 is an ambitious development of these observational tendencies which coalesce to form a dialogue between the generic materials, gateways, movements and performances of Stansted and Trabzon Airports. At over 31 minutes, the piece can afford to linger, the static and tracking shots forming a kind of choreography of bodies and objects ambling across each screen. Cavusoglu has always been interested in the conjunction of darkness and colour, and here luminous scrolling x-rays and colourful, well-lit protagonists are played off against the dull tones of the mundane security activities.  

Tim Cresswell asserts that, “ironically, while the concept of routes is supposed to make connections and link people across borders, travel itself, has often been driven by the desire to construct and consume difference.” Less ‘uneasy’ than Adrift, Point of Departure seems to be entirely caught up with the construction and consumption of difference. This is not a work about the methods of movement, though of course it is concerned with the politics and production of mobilities, nor is it concerned with ‘placelessness’ versus ‘destination’. Rather, it seems to me to be about the intersection and collisions of multiple experiences of place. The Turkish business traveller moves through a set of encounters which are coded, performed and surveyed, yet crucially his ‘mobility’ or capacity to move is differentiated from those around him. The security staff, pilots, local residents and other international travellers are all implicated in the power relations of the two airports. What Point of Departure leaves us with through its complex structuring of viewpoints and perspectives, languages and silences, is Massey’s extrovert sense of place. We can recognise some of the historical specificities of the places, whilst also seeing how players interact within these specified structures, how in effect place in produced in context.

Cavusoglu recognises the capacity of these intersecting points to reflect upon the contradictions of the postmodern world: one in which trading occurs in a gendered, historicised space; where the experience of European and North American cities is determined by cinematic and televisual representation; and where the place of the airport is still charged with the thrill of new beginnings and encounters, but still remains resolutely a fiction of border crossings. An event which is both in and out of place.

Claire Doherty is Senior Research Fellow at the University of the West of England, Bristol where she leads Situations, a research and commissioning programme which investigates the significance of place and context in contemporary art. www.situations.org.uk

Chris Darke
Airport poetics
Excerpt from Places of Departure, Monograph (Film and Video Umbrella and Haunch of Venison, 2006)

An airport is never just an airport. As symbol and site, the airport is witness to the achievement of one of mankind’s greatest species-surpassing dreams in the everyday miracle of flight. As such, it has something of the utopian about it but, like all utopian spaces, it carries within itself its opposite, the spectacle of the dream realised as either a banal, instrumental or frightful fact. The history of air travel describes a trajectory from its heroic period in the early days of the twentieth century to the current age of anxiety, ‘from Lindbergh to Bin Laden’ as a cultural historian has put it, during which time the airport has become a global gateway combining the two great preoccupations of the present age: fear and shopping. Everyone is familiar with the attendant rituals and atmosphere of the modern airport. Make your way through the throat of the security check, fold your coat, unload keys and mobile phone, submit to electromagnetic scan and manual pat-down, and pray that your face is in favour with the database lest you find yourself being spirited towards some unmarked plane standing ready for ‘rendition’. Gravitate down long neon corridors of moving walkways towards the fingers of flight departure, musing all the while on how the processing of people replicates, on a different scale, the handling of baggage. 

Ergin Cavusoglu’s film installation ‘Point of Departure’ is concerned less with flight than with the rites of passage involved in air travel, the dead time of check-in and baggage scans, the busy waiting in the sterile zones of cafés and departure lounges. It is a work that explores the airport both as an architectural structure, a machine for processing travellers and their belongings, but also as a space that lends itself to a certain poetic treatment. While it is tempting to conceive of the airport in an abstract Platonic sense it is important to acknowledge that, in its delineation of certain characteristics of ‘airport-ness’, Cavusoglu’s work departs from footage shot in two specific airports, Stansted in the south of England and Trabzon in the Turkish Black Sea region. 
Facing each other from the opposite edges of the European landmass, these two locations are subtly separated and recombined in ‘Point of Departure’. The first images that appear across all six of the installation’s carefully arranged screens are static shots of airport security gates and baggage scanners. Through their emphasis on linear composition and foreclosed space, these shots do not tell us where we are, other than in the generic ‘non-place’ of the airport and, at this point in the work, the sound-mix also contributes to this generalised airport ambience. Gradually, as the work unwinds across the screens, we notice details of colour, dress and language that identify the two locations as different, and two travellers in particular are paid special attention by Cavusoglu’s camera. A distinct, unchanging set of images unwinds throughout the work: a series of X-ray scans (‘tomograms’) of baggage as it passes through the CAT scanner, images that take on an emblematic status. We also become aware of the two different locations as spaces that, while geographically distant from each other, are presented here as being almost contiguous and giving onto another, much larger, abstract space that lies beyond the architecture of the piece even while being alluded to by it. One way of interpreting ‘Point of Departure’, then, is as a work seeking to elaborate a ‘poetics of space’ for the airport.

            Space is never just space, least of all if the space in question happens to be that of an airport. Since the inception, in the 1980s, of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in human geography and social theory the critical conception of space, or ‘spatiality’, has extended well beyond the now defunct project of post-modernism in which it once participated to inform the humanities and arts in general. It is, without question, one of the key concepts of the times through whose application the spirit of the age might be, if not revealed, then at least imagined. To invoke a ‘poetics of space’ is to allude to certain key ideas proposed by writers whose influence is fundamental, if only at the level of metaphorical suggestiveness. For example, there is of course Borges’s short story of 1945 ‘The Aleph’, referred to as the greatest metaphor for the impossibility of language, in its sequential progression, describing geography, where things are ‘stubbornly simultaneous’. Equally significant is Gaston Bachelard’s seminal 1958 study ‘La poétique de l’espace’, in which the philosopher of science presented a study of poetically charged domestic spaces such as the attic and cellar, the drawer, chest and cabinet. The Italian phenomenological philosopher Gianni Vattimo, too, has offered a compelling reading of this idea of ‘the poetic’ as regards space in relationship to Heidegger. Vattimo addresses Heidegger’s quotation of lines from Holderlin:

Voll Verdienst, doch dichterish, wohnet
Der Mensch auf dieser Erde

(Full of merit, yet poetically, man
Dwells on this earth)

While one might now find Vattimo’s argument debatable – he reads Heidegger’s account of Holderlin in terms of the transition from modernity to post-modernity – he nevertheless has useful things to say regarding the phrase ‘yet poetically man/Dwells on this earth’:

To dwell poetically does not mean to dwell in such a way that one needs poetry, but to dwell with a sensitivity to the poetic, characterised by the impossibility, in a sense, of defining clear-cut boundaries between reality and imagination. If there is a passage from modernity to post-modernity, it seems to lie in a wearing away of the boundaries between the real and the unreal or, at the very least, in a wearing away of the boundaries of the real. […]Contemporary history is that phase of history in which everything tends to be presented in the form of simultaneity’

 A characteristic of this poetic apprehension of space is the recognition of its Aleph-like capacity to embody ‘much in little’ (at one point in Borges’s fable the insufferable poet and keeper of the magical Aleph, Carlos Argentino Daneri, proclaims the Latin phrase ‘multum in parvo!’). It is evident, too, in the will to detect natural forms in man-made structures, as Bachelard does in ‘Poetics of Space’, or the ancient in the modern, as in Virilio’s description of the ancestral structure of the city gate being replaced by the airport security gate. One might go further and suggest that the poetic approach supplies figures and motifs by which it becomes possible to imagine particular spatial configurations in relation to the wider world, of which they are metonymic: for example, the relationship between, as Bachelard puts it, ‘the house and the universe’ where the house can contain a universe even while being contained by the universe. The ambition that is evident in Cavusoglu’s installation (impossibly overreaching, it has to be said, but still valuable and paradoxically modest in its execution) is to create a structure by which one might begin to imagine the world. But where does one start in this wish to embody totality? Where does one find a point of departure? If a house can become the universe then, surely, in the anxious environment of the present age, can the airport not become the world?

‘Point of Departure’ can be seen to be a work about space per se; that is, the experience and condition of contemporary globalised space as the relationship between specific places: the airports of Stansted and Trabzon, the installation itself and the space of its exhibition. This movement from the general to the particular, from space to place, is not constructed by the work as a set of oppositions (space versus place, etc) but as a series of imbrications, each being contained within and acting as a function of the other.  Two images in Cavusoglu’s installation have a ‘poetic’ function that bears this out, those that show security gates and ‘tomograms’ of luggage as it moves through the scanner. They function to send the spectator-participant shuttling backwards and forwards from the realm of the real to the realm of the imagination and back again, from the world of the airport to the structure of the installation to the space of exhibition, and beyond, and back, again and again. The ‘gate’ is itself doubled in the work, featuring as an image and an element of the structure of the dispositif. The images of Trabzon and Stansted airports obsessively document the functioning and the protocol of the security gates (a process that is noticeably more rigorous at the English end than it is at the Turkish) and the attention paid to the form and function of such gates cannot but remind one of Paul Virilio’s seminal diagnosis in ‘The Overexposed City’ in which he describes how, since the 1960s, the city is no longer governed by physical boundaries but by systems of electronic surveillance, in ‘the exo-city’ the gateway gives way to the security gate at the airport:

From here on, constructed space occurs within an electronic topology where the framing of perspective and the gridwork weft of numerical images renovate the division of urban property. The ancient private/public occultation and the distinction between housing and traffic are replaced by an overexposure in which the difference between ‘near’ and ‘far’ simply ceases to exist […] The representation of the modern city can no longer depend on the ceremonial opening of gates, nor on the ritual processions and parades lining the streets and avenues with spectators. From here on, urban architecture has to work with the opening of a new ‘technological space-time’. In terms of access, telematics replaces the doorway. The sound of gates gives way to the clatter of data banks and the rites of passage of a technical culture whose progress is disguised by the immateriality of its parts and networks … Where once one necessarily entered the city by means of a physical gateway, now one passes through an audiovisual protocol in which the methods of audience and surveillance have transformed even the forms of public greeting and daily reception

In processing people and their baggage, these gates produce images as an adjunct to one’s passport, a kind of ‘Open Sesame!’ (it no longer being enough that one’s papers are, in the old-fashioned phrase, found to be ‘in order’; one’s images too must be in order). These images are therefore part of the gate, part of its structure and protocol and, so, Cavusoglu incorporates them into his work. He does so with a sly but telling inversion. At the heart of the installation’s architecture, which is also its ‘entrance’, two screens are suspended above the floor exactly facing each other and between them the CAT scan images are projected onto the floor. This combination of two facing screens and the floor-projection forms an approximation of a gateway whose arch is inverted. Again, Virilio comes to mind: “In this new perspective devoid of horizon, the city was entered not through a gate nor through an arc de triomph, but rather through an electronic audience system”. This arrangement of elements produces an interesting effect of interdiction; true to its shape of an inverted arch, it declares ‘Do Not Enter’ and it is surprising to see how few visitors to the installation dare, or deem it acceptable, to step over, into and across the CAT scan images. ‘Point of Departure’ is therefore not an environment that one moves within, but around which one orbits, stacked like airliners, busy waiting like passengers.  

This image could be said to function as the work’s heraldic mise-en-abyme: the bags containing objects are themselves contained as they pass through the scanner. Likewise, the work itself has certain features (six screens, documentary images of its two locations, ‘character-types’ who introduce a certain horizon of fictional meaning) contained by its own spatial integrity as an installation (with the inverted gate at its core) itself contained within the larger space of exhibition. Both images (the gateways, the CAT scans) are therefore materialised in the form of the installation, they move from the space of the screen to contribute to embodying the work itself. This migration from one space to another is of a part with the work’s subject as well as its method and speaks of the movement within and between the work’s three levels of space: that of the image, that of the architectural form of the installation and that of the place it occupies within the space of exhibition (which the sound-mix helps sculpt). 

Something needs to be said about the passengers we see milling about in the airport footage, in which a man and a woman come to our attention. In fact, we can’t help but notice them. There is something in their lightly worn self-consciousness that draws our eyes to them, this sleek duo of departure lounge-lizards, a quality about them that tells us they are actors: ‘He’, with his long aristocratic face and slightly leonine swagger; ‘She’, blonde and busy rewriting a typescript at her café table. Together, they perform cameos of what the political economist Susan George has called the ‘international fast caste’, frequent flyers and privileged migrants at the opposite end of globalisation’s food chain from the refugees and neo-liberal proletariat. ‘She’ is a journalist returning from an assignment, ‘He’ is a London-based post-graduate student visiting family in Turkey, which is as much as we learn about them from the sparse dialogues. But they have a function other than being representative ‘types’, they serve to draw our attentions not only to themselves but also on their surroundings and the people around them. They fall short, in other words, of being ‘characters’ but act instead as what the French would call ‘figurants’ or the British ‘background artists’. They are there to bring out the background, to set it off, but never to fully separate themselves from it. Cavusoglu’s decision to emphasise this pair introduces an element of fiction, an imaginary horizon to the locations, the suggestion of a background story to each, but no more than that. They are heading in different directions, their paths crossing en route to different destinations. This ‘background’ is also what hovers ominously behind any depiction of any airport nowadays, the low heavy thud of modernity’s migraine, terminal velocity, death from the skies. And the question: what will happen when the fuel runs out? In port cities where the maritime industry has declined, the rivers become the focus for regeneration campaigns, the docks become new temples of cultural tourism or museums of dead industry. Rivers and waterways are geological facts. Despite the territorial weight ascribed to them (think of the concept of ‘air space’ for example) flight paths are abstractions conceived in thin air. One can readily imagine certain defunct terminals mutating into out-of-town shopping centres, equipped as they already are with malls and cinemas, their duty-free status extinguished, grass pushing through the disused runways. But what of those whose viability has depended on the increase in cheap air travel, itself dependent on the vagaries of the international oil market? Will they become abandoned outposts of the imagination, populated by phantom pilots and ghostly passengers who, like characters from a J.G. Ballard story, take on the stubbornly survivalist attributes of soldiers who don’t know that war is over, the last survivors of a dying species?

Simon Harvey
Ghost Ships in the Night: Downward Straits. A video work by Ergin Cavusoglu
Between Borders (MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Vigo, 2007) 

The dead of night and the clamour of border are strangely inverted in ErginCavusoglu’s atmospheric four screen video installationDownward Straits. Black, menacing vessels silhouetted against the brilliantly lit city of Istanbul pass silently through the Bosphorus Strait, the border between East and West, Europe and Asia. Our mute traversal ofCavusoglu’s dark straits — we walk between the screens as if running the Bosphorus at night — is nevertheless brought alive by the chatter between ships and shore. 
These themes of night and its noisy interruptions are nothing new inCavusoglu’s oeuvre, but the scale of the operations has shifted from the local to the global. Many of his earlier works such as Impasse, Street Dance and Mountain Bike (2002-03) are shot in liminal and non-spaces of cities — dark streets, doorways, pavements, thresholds to public buildings, abandoned lots. They centre on banal objects such as street signs, turnstiles and parked cars, mostly filmed in what should be the ‘dead of night’. In each of these works an everyday drama is enacted or hinted at. Sometimes this is through a strangeness that is enhanced and made more sinister, but more often it is less a documentation of the unexpected, and rather something unexpectedly documented, and hence made strange. Another work, Entanglement (2003), a blacked out, four-screen film of predatory helicopters hovering in the night sky, shown at the Istanbul and Berlin biennials (2003 and 04), makes the transition in scale: At the same time that a very local and specific anxiety, or thrill, is experienced, a new language of abstracted global fears is articulated.
Downward Straits posits another apparent shift in emphasis inCavusoglu’s work, signalled in Entanglement, from this artistic practice of ‘making strange’ out of the banal, local and everyday to reframing the already extant strangeness of global transportations and constellations using classical aesthetic grammars and tactics. Monstrous silhouetted tankers and container ships, always on-the-move, are momentarily framed by the conventional light of fixed, illuminated constructions — a mosque, a military academy and a football ground — monumental signifiers of nation, identity and religion. 
However, these shifts, not least the inversions in sound and light, are never simply black and white. Downward Straits brings baggage with it from earlier work. It does not in fact aim at aesthetically stilling the anxiety and dynamism implied by these shadowy transports (perhaps containing contrabands of flesh, drugs or arms) thereby putting a lid on the baroque tendencies of his other work. On the Bosphorus ships are highly visible but they remain indiscernible: A tension is created between this elusiveness and the historically over-determined monuments on the shore. This dissimulation has sometimes been considered to be still more extreme: Anthropologist Michael Taussig characterizes maritime trade as almost occluded: ‘The conduct of life today is utterly dependent upon the sea and the ships it bears, yet nothing is more invisible’. Thus, far from dispensing with the ‘making-strange’ that characterizes many of his earlier urban street dramas,Cavusoglu redeploys it as a fine-tuning device (or interruptor) within the already strange aesthetic of global cargo. This enables him to subtly disturb the symbolisms of darkness and light.
Neverthless,Cavusoglu has introduced another element that intermittently links the ships to the city: We hear conversations between crew and shore, in some part navigational and technical, in other part chatty and everyday. 
The continuity between one work and another, pursuing themes of estrangement, rhythms of passage and fugitive identity, is maintained in one ofCavusoglu’s most recent works, Point of Departure (2006). Here the textures and rhythms of two airports, Trabzon and London Stansted are the conveyor for another elusive story in which narrative never quite forms in the mind of the viewer and one can never place oneself in a position from where one can see all of the video installation. Rhythm is also important in Downward Straits: As the ships glide through the channel a singularity of global circulations is suggested, but beside them, and punctuating their harmony is the crackle of the port authority’s radio contact. It is as if the state is desperately trying to interpellate and call to order these ghosts in the night.
One of Downward Straits’ achievements is its strategic scale, even as it is framed in the local. As conventional transit there is passage across a natural border from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea with the radio checking credentials and affirming identities along the way. But the ships are travelling with, not across, the more significant geopolitical border — the strait as natural and historical divide between east and west — and, as transports along rather than across this border they mix up the clear mappings that in more conventional border crossing separate line from area or territory. Not only do the ships simultaneously cross a territorywhile still on and in relation to border but also they are only tenuously held by the radio orders from the city that they are slipping through. As such they are, in one sense, almost outlaw. We the viewer, for our part, escape the stark choices and orientations of the geopolitically defined orient and occident. 
Downward Straits, then, is much more than a local curiosity, a diorama of ghost ships in a familiar setting. Instead it articulates a larger, more eerie aesthetic of global transit sailing past a familiar antique grandeur. 

For more on the theory of  ‘Making Strange’, or ostranenie, see Simon Watney ‘Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror’ in Thinking Photography ed Victor Burgin, Macmillan, London, 1982. 

Standing in front of any of the four screens onto which Downward Straits is projected one notices the conventional flatness and scope of the tableau that puts one in mind of Twentieth Century mural painting. (It is no surprise, then, to discover thatCavusoglu, as an ethnic Turk living in Bulgaria back in its communist run days, was once detailed, as an army conscript, to paint social realist murals): a classical training. 

Michael Taussig ‘The Beach (a Fantasy)’ in Walter Benjamin’s Grave, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 98.

Cavusoglu’s darkly silhouetted ships seem wholly detached until one hears the ‘familiar’ radio banter between ship and city.

There is the barest hint of a narrative in which a Turkish academic, travelling between Trabzon and Stansted then further west, encounters a British woman journalist heading eastwards.

Nermin Saybasili 
Neighbours in Dialogue (Norgunk, Istanbul, 2005)

ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER 

In the conventional understanding of location, it is a site of absolute belonging, an enclosed and stable space where its physical qualities are framed and its designated activities in its boundaries are carried out. However, in his video-installation Downward Straits (2004) which was shown in 2004 Beck’s Futures Prize exhibition in the ICA London -he was shortlisted for the prize-,Ergin Cavusoglu, one of the leading emerging artists in the UK, decodes and encodes a geographical location. Revealing the presence of the unseen,Cavusoglu makes what is assumed to be familiar stranger, and urges the viewer to look at this location differently.  

In the four-screen installation work Downward Straits, that form a channel-like corridor, silhoutted tankers and container ships pass silently but also menacingly through the Bosphorus Strait in the darkness of the night. During their slow passings in both sides of the screens, their shadow-images interrupt the bright light of ?stanbul. ?stanbul, because of its geographical location, has long been holding a symbolic ‘value’ on the ideological and political map; it serves as an arena through which essentialized oppositions, such as East versus West, Islam versus Christianity, local versus global, are played out for the world politics. However because in the viewing ofCavusoglu’s installation, there is a displacement, a disorientation, this upsets any attempt to make a clear statatement geographically. Are we heading from East to West or from West to East? Either choice can be made possible according to our own wishes and prejudices. Are we crossing from the Asian side to the European side or from the European side to the Asian side? We are in fact on neither side of the city; we are in-between space. 

The dark, frontal moving images of the ships silently passing on the screens shadow the image of the busy metropolis. Being inside the channel and slipping through the city along with the silent ships, we, the viewers, can only manage to catch a glimpse of some of the landmarks of Istanbul, a mosque, a military school and a big football stadium, each being politically laden symbols of religion, nation and identity. We can also hear some conversations between the crew and coast guards. These conversations on the radio somewhat attach these ghostly ships to the city yet at the same time separate them. To recall the famous statement by Michel Foucault: 

‘... the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in the gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development ...., but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.’19

A ship is a closed box, a floating world within a fixed world. It is both here and there. It is both attainable and unattainable. It’s arrival also ensures it’s departure. The Bosphorus is the world’s geographical and imaginative crossroads; it is what connects Europe and Asia and at the same time what dissolves them. In their temporal, ghostly materiality, Cavusoglu’s ships break space-time continuum of the location and erase its geographic specificity. But the dark, two-dimensional images of these ships also recall the current stratified lansdcape of the sea, in the period of the fortification of the borders in Europe, where the water is criss-crossed by tourists, military, traders, smugglers and immigrants who are all holding different status and none of their routes, paths or trajectories intersect. 

The art works that I have touched on throughout my*discussion in this essay take their own ‘journey in space’. Here, I am not referring to a measurable quantity of movements in space and time. On the contrary, the ‘journeys’ that I am refering to are the ones which are breaking into space, taking place without inhabiting any particular space, that is becoming-place that traverses all spaces. These works introduce alternative modes of spatialization in the manner of being in space, of being for space in Deleuzien terms.20

20Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism & Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p.482
21Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p.33

Simon Harvey
3rd berlin biennial for contemporary art, catalogue text (2004)

Many of Ergin Cavusoglu’s earlier films such as Impasse, Street Dance and Mountain Bike are shot in liminal and non-spaces of cities – dark streets, doorways, pavements, thresholds to public buildings, abandoned lots - and centre on banal objects: street signs, turnstiles, parked cars.
Around each, an everyday drama is enacted or hinted at. Sometimes this is through a strangeness that is enhanced and made more sinister, but more often it is less a documentation of the unexpected, and rather something unexpectedly documented, and hence made strange. Cavusoglu ‘makes strange’ everyday events and objects in an artistic practice of engaging with the city that has its roots in pre-revolutionary Russian Futurism and Surrealism. For him, strangeness in documentation is achieved through a manipulation of differing codes of visual observation – closed-circuit television and cinematic - so that action is neither entirely legible as ‘caught’ in surveillance, nor as worked up in artistic edit.
In many ways these films all document ‘trouble’ at ground level, but in his most recent work Entanglement the drama is apparently abstracted to the air. 
The installation, a blacked out, six-screen film of helicopters hovering in the night sky, both disconcerts and entangles our senses in a symphony of tracking beams, sonic rotations and blinding light spots. A sense of anxiety circumscribes us as we try to read this lexicon of aesthetic intensities. All in all, a dangerous geometry, and one that cannot be taken as given.
For instance, the one steady component of the work, the elliptical rotation of a red light, is actually a child’s toy helicopter flying beneath a ceiling. A key, or, a clue perhaps, to the unfixity of scale in operation here, between the specific and the global, from child’s models to international policing. 
Is it an individual that has become ‘entangled’ in something illicit and is being tracked by the authorities? Or is it the swarm of helicopters that cannot pull away, even if they want to, and have themselves become vulnerable?
In this interplay between the ground and indeterminate airspace, in Cavusoglu’s orchestration of discordant lights, a new language of abstracted global fears is articulated at the same time that a very local and specific anxiety, or pleasure, is experienced.

Craig Burnett
Out of Time, Out of Mind: Two video installations by Ergin Cavusoglu (2004)

“Don’t tell me nobody’s interested”, says one of the currency traders in Ergin Cavusoglu’s Tahtakale, “we’ve been going for two days”. The trader is, of course, talking about a specific deal, an exchange of perhaps $100,000 or more, but the video installation stirs up a slightly out-of-time atmosphere, and one could almost imagine him saying, “we’ve been going for hundreds of years”. The language is brusque and macho, as it has been, no doubt, for generations: just one of the rules behind the elaborate game he plays with other traders. If another trader is “interested”, and the negotiation successful, he’ll go to a stall within the bazaar, consult the gun-toting man who protects the safe that holds the hard cash. All in a day’s work. Tahtakale shows us a slice of Istanbul bazaar life, a cluster of contemporary men going about their daily business, and yet something else is at work beneath the tough talk and mobile phones – a network of cultural forces, ancient and deep, is revealed by the structure of Cavusoglu’s looped videos. Although the artist had to gain permission to film this secret world, the conditions that animate the events he captured transcend the specifics of the deal and the lives of the traders. 

Despite working with moving pictures, a medium that brings with it the automatic suggestion of narrative, Cavusoglu shows us a picture rather than a story. As an artist who trained as a painter, his video loops develop expressive power by working within the strengths of painting – composition, rhythm, line and colour – while still exploiting the temptation of narrative offered by video. Tahtakale comprises two screens that show us men in the heat of flurried currency trading, a third, between these two, provides subtitles, while a fourth shows us men carrying heavy bottles of photographic fluid on their backs. In the background, a male choir sings a piece of Byzantine music, a touch that lends a sacred mood to the workaday proceedings. Cavusoglu says he chose the music because it was probably written within 200 metres of the bazaar, but also because it adds a “notion of timelessness” to the video. Without the music, the piece might come across as an incomplete, slightly confusing documentary; the music, and the loop structure, loosens the events from a specific time. The identity of the men scarcely matters, nor does the amount they trade. Tahtakale is about the ideas and cultural forces that animate the process of trading, and the men become ghosts of ancient traders in the midst of an endless, inevitable drama. Indeed, the tough talk probably acts to mask awareness of how little they determine their destiny. This looped, pictorial structure, in which the elements exist as a kind of immanent machine rather than a narrative, is essential to Cavusoglu’s method.  

Poised in the Infinite Ocean, a three-screen video installation, has a similarly fatalistic and otherworldly mood. “The sailor’s life had not been the adventure he thought it would be”, intones the narrator in a deadpan American accent, “but he stayed with it for lack of choice”. The text is a segment that the artist lifted from The Outlaw Sea, a book about the anarchy of the commercial shipping world by American writer William Langewiesche. This particular segment takes place in the Bay of Biscay, where Poised in the Infinite Ocean was shot, and is meant to act as a complement to the three-screen projection rather than provide content for illustration. But the narration provides that essential hint of narrative: a life led, a character adrift in the infinite ocean seeking a destiny that is directed, ultimately, by forces that are unknowable and uncontrollable. 
   
A desire for coherent narrative engenders a timeless, endlessly repeatable action, and the structure of Cavosoglu’s video loops mirrors that desire. The imagery of Poised in the Infinite Ocean play with light as a metaphor for direction and guidance: a lighthouse, a grid of city lights, dawn, points of light amid the seemingly infinite choices we face everyday. But the short loop (only 5:20, thought it seems longer) also plunges us into the thick darkness of a thunderstorm, creating an atmosphere in which we long for a flash of light, a guide or saviour. The photography of Poised in the Infinite Ocean is achingly gorgeous, a seductive and lyrical triptych that provokes desire in the viewer, and thus the effect of the imagery mimics our desire for control, guidance and meaning. 

The phrase “lack of choice” haunts Cavusoglu’s work. Tahtakale and Poised in the Infinite Ocean may reveal that most of our lives revolve on a wheel of fortune that powerful natural and cultural forces control, and yet his work is also fortified by the artist’s faith in the revelatory force of pictures. We all have a story to tell, and though we probably don’t know, exactly, where we’re going or might end up, Cavusoglu’s videos helps us to see, for a moment at least, where we are.

Sally O’Reilly
Poetic Justice, 8th International Istanbul Biennial catalogue text (2003)

Ergin Cavusoglu exposes the regions of urban life that lie between the private and the public. He explores how personal and cultural identities are negotiated in both spheres, yet frames these images of ordinariness so that they become ambiguous. The videos employ an elicit voyeurism as they follow the exploits of individuals, unaware of the artist’s presence, who believe themselves to be out of sight, buried in the crowd or undercover of darkness. City dwellers, stray dogs, adolescents searching for their place in society all slip almost unnoticed over the boundary between inclusion and exclusion. Dramatic scenes unfold as people perform enigmatic activities at twilight: they play in wastelands, argue on the street or create mischief as well as an inadvertent Duchampian sculpture with a bicycle perched on top of a road sign. The video installation ‘Entanglement’ represents the point at which the divide between public and private, night and day is transgressed, as helicopter searchlights sinisterly sweep the night skies. Yet in the artificial, idealised gallery space the imagery is an abstracted drama of light and sound; urban reality becomes a formal, plastic medium. 

Beral Madra
‘Twenty-four hours in the life of the viewer’, La Biennale di Venezia, 50th International Art Exhibition, catalogue text (2003)
In figurative compositions, architecture, and urban landscapes he explores the relationship between humans and their environment, the multiplicity, diversity and ambiguity of the social landscape. Through the images personal and cultural identities are negotiated and located in urban everyday life. The images take ordinariness to the point of ambiguity, forcing the viewer to dig deeper and draw their own conclusions.

PRESS CLIPPINGS

SPEAKING POWER TO (POST) TRUTH
Mimi Wong
ArtAsiaPacific (February, 2019) Other works rely less on cultural, historical frameworks and instead utilize the tools of design and technology to reflect our pervasive sense of cognitive dissonance. The site-responsive Silent Systems (2011–19) by Cavusoglu, a Bulgarian-born and London-based artist, flattens a 3D rendering of a ship—a reference to Noah’s Ark, we are told—to an outline on the floor and wall. The result offers an optical illusion that visitors can step into. There’s also the added component of a CCTV camera pointed directly at the work, so anyone walking across can be seen on a monitor hanging in front of the reception desk. The relationship between migration and surveillance that the “silent system” alludes to certainly warrants further exploration, but perhaps it’s the inherent disconnect that comes across more strongly. The nightmarish vision of a sleeping man ensnared by rope in Cavusoglu’s video And I Awoke (2012) complements the aptly titled Wake Up (2012) by Filipino-American artist James Clar. An alarm clock trapped in a soundproof vacuum chamber that rings regularly but without anyone to hear stands in as almost too accurate a metaphor for the current socio-political state. 

Speaking Power to (Post) Truth curated by Sara Raza at Jane Lombard Gallery
ARTE FUSE (January 31, 2019) Jane Lombard Gallery is currently presenting the group exhibition Speaking Power to (Post) Truth, curated by Sara Raza, recently the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator for the Middle East and North Africa. The exhibition brings together a constellation of five contemporary international artists Ergin Cavusoglu, James Clar, Mounir Fatmi, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Shahpour Pouyan. Their work reveals a complex pattern of inquiry that seeks to explore deep associations with human consciousness and (post) truth, referencing important historical, literary, social, and political issues. Spanning across a range of media including drawing, installation, sculpture and video, the featured artists unite to create a site-responsive display. The transference of power to (post) truth travels through different temporalities, casting alternative webs of realities. In particular, two main site-responsive installations by Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Ergin Cavusoglu seek to complicate normative ideas of looking and deciphering both conscious and unconscious bias. Cavusoglu remaps the gallery’s architecture to produce a scaled anamorphic floor drawing entitled Silent Systems (2011) that employs optical illusion. The drawing is composed of a 3D rendering of a ship and references Noah’s Arc one of the first migratory vessels. Audiences are invited to interact with the drawing by walking across its entire surface and this act is recorded via a security camera, which relays this interaction onto a monitor displaying what appears to be surreal images of audience members walking inside a sculpture. The work is inspired by a dream sequence featured in a corresponding video And I Awoke (2012) that takes its inspiration from Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession and its famous dream sequence, of a man entangled in rope on a bed.

“But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa”
Jesi Khadivi
Bordercrossings (Issue 148, December 2018) 
Bulgarian artist Ergin Cavusoglu’s installation Dust Breedingtranslates the floor plan of a cement factory into an anamorphic drawing executed in vinyl on the floor of GAM. As visitors navigate the surface of the drawing, their movements are captured by a closed-circuit television camera. A nearby monitor shows the images, in which viewers appear to be standing in a three-dimensional structure. 

Paradise Lost: Middle Eastern Art at the Guggenheim
Rahel Aima
Art in America (June, 2016)
The interplay between the layers suggests mashrabiya lattice screens and barbed wire, means of arresting movement. Visitors are encouraged to walk across Dust Breeding (2015), Bulgarian-born, London-based Turkish artist Ergin Cavusoglu’s anamorphic floor drawing that takes its title from Man Ray’s 1920 photograph of Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes ; a closed-circuit camera is trained upon a vantage point from which the drawing looks three-dimensional. But the monitor that relays these images is out of the sight line, several yards away. Both Hefuna and Cavusoglu’s works suggest a Middle East that becomes both legible and mobile only when mediated from a considerable distance. 

BUT A STORM IS BLOWING FROM PARADISE: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA
The New Yorker (June 2016)
A hazy curatorial theme of “geometry” (drawn from Islamic decorative arts) shoehorns some strong projects (including an anamorphic projection by Ergin Cavusoglu) with the sort of homogenized, foreign but not too foreign declarations of identity and history already familiar from art fairs.

Turkish art in the city that never sleeps
Frieze New York, ‘Court and Cosmos’ and more
Emma Harper 
Cornucopia (May 5, 2016)
As one of the world’s art meccas, New York is always teeming with exhibitions, fairs and public art installations. This month a good number of the thousands of works on display are by artists from Turkey, both present and past. So lace up your trainers, because we’re traipsing around the Big Apple to see all the Turkish art on offer. 
The focus, however, is on Ergin Cavusoglu, whose solo exhibition at Rampa Istanbul, Which sun gazed down on your last dream?, is running concurrent with Frieze New York. From new sculptures to video, painting and drawing, Cavusoglu’s works explore a kind of metaphoric inebriation from wondering about and wandering in the trivialities of the world – they look at the everyday in a uniquely philosophical and spiritual manner. Not only does Rampa’s stand at Frieze New York act as a mirror to this solo exhibition, it also shows the artist’s range by displaying works from 1998 to today. The impetus behind emphasising Cavusoglu’s work is his inclusion in But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art from the Middle East and North Africa at the Guggenheim. Opening April 29 and on view until October 5, the exhibition features his three-channel video ‘Crystal & Flame’ (2010), which has recently been acquired by the museum. The show, curated by Sara Raza, will travel to the Pera Museum in 2017, where visitors will also be able to see Gülsün Karamustafa’s installation ‘Create your own story with the given material’ (1997). (While her work was also acquired by the Guggenheim, it won’t be displayed in the New York show.)

Translation of tradition. Ergin Cavusoglu in Istanbul
Antonello Tolve
Artribune (April 1, 2016) 
" Galeria Rampa, Istanbul - until 7 May 2016. All the magical world of Ergin Cavusoglu in Turkish gallery spaces. To immerse the viewer in a marine silence and in a special environment, which encodes the dream."
With a post-modern nature softness in which the citation, the different repetition and translation of the tradition are treated in key exquisitely elettrologica, Ergin Cavusoglu (Tirgoviste, 1968) puts forward a pararcheologico path that makes use of various materials and invites the public to discovering traces, memory debris, landscapes and precious objects. Thanks to a linguistic arsenal that combines sculpture - elegant installation Percé Rock (2016) -, video, photography and painting (the series Spheres of the Firmament Anthropomorphism is a dive In the timelessness of 2015), the artist constructs the ramp Istanbul a daydream ( which sun gazed down on your last dream? is the question mark that acts as food for the journey to the exhibition) made ??of imaginative discoveries. In the street, in an outpost of the gallery, Place After Place (2008) is an enveloping device that opens and closes an exciting exhibition itinerary. 

Interview with Ergin Cavusoglu
The 4th International Canakkale Biennial
Raffaele Quattrone 
Wall Street International
(30 October, 2014)1914-1918 The Centenary of World War I is the broader theme of the 4th International Canakkale Biennial held in the city of Canakkale, Turkey that is an important geographical point where Mediterranean, European and Middle-Eastern cultures intersect. This fourth instalment of the Biennial borrows its title and conceptual framework from Plato’s statement “Only the dead have seen the end of war”, with the aim to reflect on past and present political, social and cultural events that occurred as a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman and Russian empires, and furthermore the resulting calamities of war in the region. The Biennial invited some leading contemporary artists (among which Maja Bajevic, Ergin Cavusoglu, Douglas Gordon, IRWIN, Anri Sala, etc.) to interpret the repercussions of cycles of war and peace and the following political, economical, social and cultural developments in Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle-East thus stimulating positive debates about the future of the younger generations. On the occasion of the opening of the Biennial I met Ergin Cavusoglu and had the chance to talk about his project Lundy, Louis, Barge and Troy created for the 4th International Canakkale Biennial.
Ergin Cavusoglu was born in Bulgaria as part of the Turkish minority and studied in Istanbul and London where he lives and works. He has enjoyed solo exhibitions in different spaces and countries including BM Contemporary Art Centre, Istanbul (1996), Haunch of Venison, Zurich (2007), Kunstverein Freiburg and ShContemporary, Shanghai (2008), Ludwig Forum Fur Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2009), The Pavilion Downtown Dubai – UAE (2011), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2011), etc. He represented Turkey at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and was shortlisted for Artes Mundi 4 – the UK's biggest international contemporary art prize and Beck’s Futures prize in 2004. He was also included in many group exhibitions and International Biennials as the First Kyiv International Biennial of contemporary art (2012), the 3rd Berlin Biennial (2003) and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003). He is well-known for his multi-screen video installations in which he explores and posits questions about our place in a globalised society marked by mobility and meeting between different cultures. In his artworks he reflected about concepts like space, non-place, liminality and the conditions of cultural production.
Lundy, Louis, Barge and Troy (2014) is your last masterpiece commissioned and produced for the 4th International Canakkale Biennial. Could you please tell something about this new project and its link to the aim of the Biennial?
Lundy, Louis, Barge and Troy is a two-channel video and sound installation that was commissioned and produced specifically for the 4th International Çanakkale Biennial 2014. The conceptual framework is twofold: one screen presents the shipwrecks of the fleet of the Allies that were sunk in the approach to the strait of Dardanelles in Turkey during the ‘Gallipoli Campaign’ of World War One. The second video channel shows the bustle of contemporary vessels crisscrossing the blue waters above. The work’s title is composed of the names of the ships and the edit of the footage implies that the battleships perished along the same axis one following the other. The camera tracks slowly over the length of the shipwrecks thus revealing them from an unfamiliar bird’s eye perspective. Their decaying remnants are both hauntingly beautiful and menacing. We cannot escape thoughts about the circumstances of their ill fate. However the work does not attempt to illustrate or narrate these uncontrollable conditions and acts of war. Instead, through a very particular filming technique of vertically scanning the seabed and the waters above, the work endeavours to signify the importance of the act of sombre remembrance and reconciliation. This is further emphasized by the installation that presents the cinematic footage over two large vertically positioned and set apart angled screens thus acting like gates of heaven and hell, past and present.
Between the artworks included in this edition of the Biennial which works have drawn your attention?
The biennial presents a diverse range of works including multi-media installations, paintings, sculptures and photographs. Among them I was drawn to Klaus vom Bruch’s performance and video piece entitled War Capriccio (2011), Douglas Gordon’s 10 ms-1 (1994), Murat Gok’s Low Approach (2009) video piece, Radenko Milak’s series of watercolours, Tunca Subasi’s paintings and the single-channel video of Akram Zatari entitled Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013), among many others.
With reference to your artwork and the two different video channels (one presenting the shipwrecks of the fleet of the Allies and one the bustle of contemporary vessels) it seems to me a reflection on two different ideals and approaches. We are living in an age of fast and big changes as for an example the globalisation and the multiculturalism, do you think that the art can help us to reflect about these changes and rediscover a new sense of ethics or awareness of responsibility?
Art has always fulfilled multiplicity of socio-political roles depending on the framework, the stage where the artworks are presented and moreover the inner capacity of art to tell a story or comment on the everyday in a non-linear format. The fast-paced age we live in often requires kind of pauses, interruptions and points of reflection. Art in its current modes of production and dissemination often acts as an anchor, or a catalyst for understanding and responding to issues related to globalisation, multiculturalism, morality and indeed ethics.
“Limen” is a Latin word meaning a line, a boundary establishing an inclusion/exclusion relationship, a link between what is inner and what is outer. This is a long-time theme often present in your artistic practice. Why it is so important in your practice?
The broader themes of in-betweenness and liminality often resonate throughout the range of my artworks. The concept of liminality is central to my practice on a multitude of levels and experiences and my close encounter with various forms of expression that I have acquired throughout my extensive education in fine art from classical forms of expression to more contemporary guises. The separate projects are structured in several themes, which unfold different aspects of the conceptualisations of space, place and rhythm analysis in a broader sense. They often present different registers of mobility looking at the ideas on a progressive sense of place, patterns of ‘social spaces’, and the notion of borders from a number of perspectives. The architecture of the installations further emphasise and aid the understanding of these notions in the ways they are experienced by the viewer.
Turkey is a land that borders East and West and historically a stage for the negotiation and dialogue between different cultures and people. How much has this condition had a bearing on your formation as artist?
Lundy, Louis, Barge and Troy represents another instalment of my work in the pursuit of themes of estrangement and spatial geometry seen earlier in Downward Straits (2004). The liminal zone of the strait that separates East from West at the Bosphorus is now repositioned along the vertical axis looking down and upwards, so as to imply a proactive space between existence and non-existence. This inversion of space acts simultaneously as a point of reflection and spatial displacement.
How and when did your art passion is born and developed in these years?
I was born in Bulgaria and commenced my studies in Fine Art at the age of 14 at The National School of Fine Arts ‘Iliya Petrov’, Sofia in the early 1980s. However my father is also a professional artist and a scholar and I actually began preparing for the art school even at an earlier age. This was followed by an extensive art education in its modern and contemporary guises at the University of Marmara, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Portsmouth. This extensive engagement with various forms of expression and thinking processes informed my practice on a multitude of levels.
What are your future projects?
As always I work on multiple of projects simultaneously. They range from large-scale video and film installations, three-dimensional sculptural works and site-specific anamorphic drawing installations to more conventional line drawings and sometimes just utilising or appropriating found, or what I call ‘nature-made' objects. The core of my practice is the layering of ideas thus attempting to map out the thinking processes that help us to comprehend socio-political issues, as well as introspectively addressing maters related to the conditions of cultural production and scholarly understating of art today. The pattern of literary references in my narrative works unfold a series of moral parables that have a hypothetical relevance to contemporary art and comment on the creative processes at large. I am currently collaborating with the New York based scriptwriter Arnold Barkus on a feature film entitled Ephemeral Patterns. This work stems from a major initiative by the then UK Film Council and Arts Council England in 2007 when I was asked to propose an idea and then commissioned to write a full-length feature film script based on the strength of my research into the narrative-based moving image. I am also in the production stages of a large three-channel video and sound installation project that was commissioned by Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp, in a partnership with 0090 Festival, Belgium, FLACC, Genk, SAHA Istanbul, Spacex, Exeter and Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Hasselt. The collaboration will result in a series of solo exhibitions at each venue in the 2014 – 2015 period and an accompanying publication. The project is called Desire Lines - Tarot and Chess. The concept takes its cue from Italo Calvino’s book The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), and obliquely reflects on elements from Vladimir Nabokov’s book The Luzhin Defence (1930). One of the components will be a scene that depicts a poetry-reading event. The poems have been commissioned specifically for the project and I already have commitments from internationally renowned poets such as Jo Shapcott, T.S. Eliot Prize winner Philip Gross, the human geaographer and poet Tim Cresswell and Susan Wicks among others.

Adaptation – Cinefication
Ergin Cavusoglu
Cornucopia Magazine (2014)
The latest exhibition from the Turkish artist Ergin Cavusoglu examines the artist’s engagement with painting in its classical and contemporary guises, and juxtaposes them with his better-known film installations. Cavusoglu thus retraces recurring preoccupations in his practice, showing his older works in a new context.
The wider concept refers directly to the ‘The Soviet project of “cinefication” that represents the most grandiose scheme of film distribution, exhibition and reception that the world has known to date’, as described by Thomas Lahusen. Cavusoglu borrows this framework to comment on the current globalised system of ‘cinefication’ of the arts.

Guleryuz and Cavusoglu show career shifts at Istanbul’s Rampa Gallery
Alexandra Ivanoff
Today's Zaman (March 12, 2014)
Cavusoglu's "Adaptation - Cinefication" in the two-room Rampa gallery across the street shows examples of his former life as a painter in one room; in the other, a darkened screening room with rows of cinema chairs, his five recent short films are being screened in a continuous loop. Using ominous, repetitive music (some of which was specifically composed for the project), the five pieces each have a similar existential loneliness that connects them. Both Rampa exhibits are on view through April 5.

Adaptation - Cinefication
TimeOut Istanbul( April 4th - 6th, 2014) 
Saturday is your last chance to see Ergin Cavusoglu's show "Adaptation - Cinefication" at RAMPA, which applies the Soviet concept of "cinefication" – a complex and hyper-organized scheme of artistic production, distribution, exhibition and reception – to current trends in the arts.

In the studio: Interview with Ergin Cavusoglu discussing his work inspired by Marcel Duchamp
SEDITION BLOG (October, 2013) 
http://blog.seditionart.com/2013/10/02/in-the-studio-interview-with-ergin-cavusoglu-discussing-his-work-inspired-by-marcel-duchamp/ 

Following his recent launch on Sedition, we caught up with Cavusoglu who talked us through his latest artworks, his interest in Marcel Duchamp, and his meticulous creative process.

Could you tell us a little more about the pieces you have created for Sedition?
I created specifically for Sedition three video pieces entitled One Hundred Thousand Balls, Joker Shuffle and Bubble Dart, all (2013). All three works convey ideas influenced by and comment on Marcel Duchamp’s ironic certificate called the Monte Carlo Bond or Obligation pour la Roulette de Monte Carlo, which he issued in 1924. For instance One Hundred Thousand Balls reflects on the Company Statutes document, which Duchamp used to advisedly legitimise his illicit bonds. Bubble Dart on the other hand substitutes with a dartboard the roulette wheel onto which his photograph taken by Man Ray is superimposed, thus making him a target. Moreover Joker Shuffle visually and contextually interprets his portrait with hair covered in foam and shaped into pointed horns, and so on and so forth.

Can you tell us about your creative process when approaching making new works?
My approach to art making is that it is foremost a scholarly activity and my creative process frequently involves distilling complex visual and textual information and contextual materials that all somehow have hypothetical relevance to the perceived systems of art. Interestingly the visual manifestation of an artwork is the last element I consider in the course of developing an idea. For example this particular body of works begun a while ago with a concept, which I will outline below in the very abstract and incoherent format entered in my notebook:
“Artists indexed market value of currencies. Each country will be rated according to the calibre of artists it produces and their place in the stock market. Rather elitist results predicted. Artists determined market value is the only real value as it is abstract and unsolicited…” (20 August 2012)
Another statement I wrote in my notebook on 17 June 2012 declares that:
“The most creative times are when you are not making artworks, but thinking about them. The making of art devoids of creativity.”
In an essence I first map out and test the concept, content, and context of the project over a prolonged period before I launch into making. Although I am better known for the large-scale spatial video installations, my practice is grounded in classical understanding of art, both in the making and the thinking. Therefore I will approach each concept with the medium it necessitates rather then being driven by so called signature style and medium specificity.

What inspired you to use Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond as a reference point for your digital editions on Sedition?
Possibly the most important aspect of Duchamp’s practice for me is the layering of contexts and the engagement with the intellectual rather then the visual. It is that extra depth and complexity in his work I find very rewarding. Moreover in the Monte Carlo Bond he questioned the actual system of art, and in the process helped establishing the current modes of art production, distribution and consumption, which is also curiously related to aspects of the digital format of dissemination employed by Sedition.

How do the works contribute to your wider practice and ideas explored in your work?
The themes explored in these pieces are very much intrinsic to broader ideas I am currently developing for a large narrative video installation piece. In that sense the films are both part of a larger body of works, but moreover of interrelated systems of creative thinking.

What interests you about distributing your work digitally?
The de-materialisation of the images in the process of digitisation allows the viewer to test the conceptual and contextual parameters of the artwork without the guidance and the tools employed by the traditional art establishments. It is certainly more democratic, but at the same time challenging. The work of art has to compete with an array of visually complex high and low production imagery available across various digital media platforms that are inextricably generative and occupy a large chunk of our everyday interactions and communications with the outside world. I quite like the idea of positioning art within these very competitive and fast-paced domains of popular culture.

What are your favorite artworks on Sedition?
I like works that are intellectually challenging and multifaceted. Works that offer not just visual, or retinal complexity and satisfaction, but also generate an intellectual thought and discourse and thus threading a connectedness to established art forms from past and present.

What are your current projects and exhibitions? What are your plans for the upcoming months?
In the last two years I have been developing a project entitled Desire Lines -Tarot and Chess, which will consist of a large-scale three channel video and sound installation, sculptures, paintings and anamorphic drawings. The work was commissioned by Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp in partnership with 0090 Platform, and FLACC, Genk. The final piece will manifest itself next year in a series of large-scale solo exhibitions, site-specific works and process driven projects across the different venues. Desire Lines – Tarot and Chess examines the convergence of destiny and chance, and the disjunction and dissonance that takes place when juxtaposed with notions of the logical, categorical and rational, and which will be broadly positioned in the realms of the speak-able and the visible, or the literary and the pictorial.
The installation will consist of three distinct elements. The conceptual framework is based on the tarot and the game of chess, with references to their depictions in literature. The Tarot section takes its cue from Italo Calvino’s book ‘The Castle of Crossed Destinies’ (1973), whereas Chess remotely reflects on elements from Vladimir Nabokov’s book ‘The Luzhin Defence’ (1930). Calvino’s book portrays an encounter of travelers who tell their adventures (or whose adventures are told for them) using tarot cards instead of words. The interpretations of the cards in the book allude to classic tales such as Faust, Oedipus, and Shakespearian narratives such as Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. The third component of the installation will be a scene that depicts a poetry-reading event. This scene will act as a catalyst that will attempt to arbitrate between the Tarot and Chess elements. The poems will be commissioned specifically for the project under the theme of Desire Lines. They are broadly paths of will that represent the search for the shortest navigational route between an origin and destination. Structurally the work will attempt to entwine and present a series of moral and philosophical tales in the tangible format of theatrical performance.

Sculpture in motion for a city in motion 
Christopher Lord
The National, Dubai, UAE (18 October 2011)
Despite what your eyes tell you, Ergin Cavusoglu's sculptures aren't really there. An interactive art installation by the celebrated Turkish artist is at The Pavilion, Downtown Dubai until December 4, and draws viewers into a 3D wire-frame world that appears and disappears around their feet.
Dust Breeding is a one-piece, non-commercial show that comes at a key time for the Turkish artist. He's just had a wildly successful solo exhibition at Istanbul's RAMPA space that coincided with the city's biennial last month.
Cavusoglu's artistic practice is all about playing with perspective. Walking into The Pavilion's Gallery 1 space, seemingly abstract strips of vinyl creep across the concrete floor and move up the walls. Carefully positioned lighting shimmers from above, creating a depth of glow around the red and yellow lines. But it's only when the piece is viewed from a certain angle that the intention behind this work becomes clear: from the correct perspective, the abstract lines take shape as a wire-frame model of a factory that seems to rise up from the ground.
Cavusoglu has sited a camera at this vantage point, with a monitor just next to it. As viewers walk into the space, they float into view on-screen - ensconced in a three-dimensional sculpture complete with walls, chimneys and windows.
He's staged a number of these anamorphic installations in the past, and is also comfortable using film, creating multiple-screen pieces that meld scenes together into a stack of layered narrative. But the interactive element that is key to Dust Breeding really gives it life. The October 2 opening night saw crowds floating merrily en masse through the artist's 3D construction on-screen.
The National spoke to Cavusoglu just before his show opened, after he'd spent a couple of days exploring Dubai: "When you fly in, you see the patterns of the desert, and then these oases of buildings in between. But on the ground, driving on roads that move between this architecture, I really started to think about the work again. You experience the piece by moving through it and this city is very much like that. I know architects think that the way we move through a building is formulaic but I don't know whether the city's planners designed Dubai in that way."
The show has been brought to The Pavilion by Sara Raza, a London-based curator, who also worked with Cavusoglu on his recent RAMPA show. She explains that the Turkish artist develops on ideas championed by Marcel Duchamp early in the 20th century. Duchamp pioneered the idea of the readymade, and the very act of moving an object into a gallery imbuing it with a contemplative value, regardless of its material value in society. Duchamp did it with a urinal, but here, Cavusoglu offers an "abstraction of the readymade", Raza says. "This is a 'post-object' artwork," in that it he has transported an architectural drawing of a cement factory in Turkey into an art gallery.

The factory that the work is based on sits just outside of Istanbul, on a lonely industrial highway stretching to Ankara. It is a cement factory, dubbed "Noah" by its owner, and was also used as the set for Cavusoglu's two-channel film Silent Glide, directed in 2008/2009. It is the largest cement factory in Europe. "The sheer scale of the building is overwhelming," says the artist.
Cement is, of course, a symbol very pertinent to rapid urban growth, particularly in the Gulf. "But cement is also very ephemeral," Cavusoglu notes. "It begins as a powder, with a density like sand, but through solidification becomes something real and solid." He makes a connection between this process and the idea of moving through one of his anti-sculptures to bring it to life.
The temperament of Dubai has only confirmed Cavusoglu's belief in wanting to site this piece here.
"I didn't realise how diverse the city is. I wouldn't just call it international because it's a new breed of nomads."
Cavusoglu was born in Bulgaria, travelled back and forth to Turkey throughout his life and has now settled, for the time being, in London. The transience of this anti-sculpture - coming and going depending on perspective - has direct parallels in the city that it's housed in as well as the artist's own life.
"I feel very much at home here in Dubai. It's a particular type of mentality that's drawn to these places. It's becoming more common and for me - it represents the future."
Smart, interactive and welcome to varied interpretation, Dust Breeding is a worthy insight into a conceptually tight voice in new Turkish art, and best viewed by night.

From Old Disco to New Media, Istanbul Capitalizes on Biennial
By Susanne Fowler
The New York Times (September 14, 2011) 
ISTANBUL — With 4,000 art-world professionals and 700 journalists descending on Istanbul this week for the opening of “Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial),” curators at galleries and museums around the city are capitalizing on the event by staging parallel screenings and exhibitions.

Rampa “Alterity” is the name of the solo show at this gallery in the Akaretler-Besiktas neighborhood through Nov. 5 by Ergin Cavusoglu, a Turk born in Bulgaria and living in London. The show, named exhibition of the month by Time Out Istanbul, is a disparate mix of new pieces and previous video works that examines the human tendency to search for structure and meaning in what could just be coincidences. Case in point: Scenes inside a homey Turkish restaurant where an anecdote reveals an unexpected ending.

Seriously contemporary
By Rachel Spence
Parallel events: Best of the rest in Istanbul
Financial Times (23 September 2011)
Ergin Cavusoglu
Dreamy, cerebral installations, drawings and film from London-based Bulgarian Ergin Cavusoglu. The centrepiece is the five-channel film installation “Crystal & Flame”, inspired by an Italo Calvino text, but the show-stoppers are floor drawings that leap into three dimensions as spectators cross them. 

10 of the best exhibitions at the Istanbul biennial
Fiachra Gibbons
The Guardian (21 September 2011) 
Another very different retelling is Ergin Cavusoglu's Alterity (at the Rampa gallery until 20 October), a rewarding meditation on the great Turkish film Yol and Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, which both feature donkeys in central roles.
• Antrepo 3. Cavusoglu's Alterity runs at Rampa, 21a Sair Nedim Caddesi, Akaretler, Besiktas, rampaistanbul.com

Aesthetic, complex works on display at Rampa
Hurriyet Daily News (25 October 2011) 
Rampa, Istanbul is hosting Ergin Cavusoglu’s solo exhibition titled ‘Alterity’ until Nov. 5. Cavusoglu’s exhibition Alterity considers the human impulse to see pattern and meaning in otherwise random events. His videos and sculptures examines and explores this interpretive urge as an inbuilt and intellectual reflex. 

Ergin Cavusoglu’s current “Alterity” exhibition of his sculptures and video works at Istanbul’s Rampa in the Besiktas neighborhood, once again consists of a number of disparate elements. Unveiling a number of new pieces alongside highlights from his repertoire of video works, Cavusoglu retraces recurring preoccupations in his practice and shows older work in a new light.
As an artist, Cavusoglu explores geographies and informal architecture and reflects them in his creations with aesthetic and complex language.
The centerpiece of the “Alterity” exhibition is a five-screen installation, Crystal & Flame, expanded from its first staging in London in 2010. This work takes its cue from a quote from “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” by writer Italo Calvino, who describes the transformative properties of fire and the phenomenon of crystallization as exemplars of natural forces that echo the competing energies at work in the contemporary city.
Within the weave of the piece itself, form emerges out of flux before becoming re-cast and re-forged. Embodying this process is the filmed rehearsal of a theater play, in which the director (as surrogate for the artist) endeavors to harness the parallel efforts and instincts of the actors, balancing the creative virtues of improvisation with the demands of the script.
A further layer of meaning is bestowed by the play itself, adapted from a short story by Chekhov. In its ambiguous stance on the merits and the limits of freedom, it contrasts a Utopian desire to both seize and change the moment with a somber apprehension of the role of fate.
Two iconic video sequences bookend the rehearsal footage. In one, a precious stone is honed and polished in the sanctum of a gem-cutter’s studio. In the other, a conversation ensues in the home-from-home of a local Turkish restaurant, the evident warmth of the gathering stoked by simple food from a rudimentary grill.
The mood cools and the food loses some its appeal as one of the protagonists talks (at great length) of a film he aims to make, which addresses the tragedy of rural poverty and culminates in a scene where the daughter of a peasant family dies after the donkey she is riding wanders into a minefield.
A new piece by Cavusoglu picks up the thread, reinforcing the influence of brute reality and the asininities of destiny. Alluding to Robert Bresson’s film “Au Hasard Balthazar,” Cavusoglu’s video invokes not only its formal composition but also its iconography and its symbolism. In Bresson’s film, a humble donkey (a metonym for Christ) enacts its own journey of grief and suffering as it is passed on from owner and subjected to increasing indignities. Coincidentally, as if to prove that chance always carries a sting in its tail, the donkey’s fate exactly mirrors that of the girl that first kept him as a pet. Although Cavusoglu’s video follows closely in Balthazar’s footsteps, it cannot hope to carry the stern force of Bresson’s stark parable; indeed its subject may be how stories themselves are passed on, and made to serve new masters.
One of those chance encounters that reveal everyday surrealism, the image of the bike pinned and spread-eagled alongside the ‘Balthazar’ video, lends it a whole other significance. The video is accompanied by drawings and sculptural objects (including a rendition of the bike itself).
These collateral works extend the themes of the video elements and continue the interplay of complexity and chance within the exhibition as a whole.

Cavusoglu exhibition unravels the processes of perfection
Rumseya Kiger, Istanbul 
Today's Zaman (19 September 2011) 
“Baskalik/Alterity,” a selected retrospective exhibition by Turkish conceptual artist Ergin Cavusoglu, is currently on display at the Rampa art gallery in Istanbul’s Akaretler neighborhood.

Bringing together old and new works from the London-based artist, the show is filled with references to the world of literature, cinema and art history.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Cavusoglu’s 2010 video installation “Crystal & Flame” (2010), commissioned by the Film and Video Umbrella organization in the UK. Taking its name from a passage in Italian author Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millenium,” the installation piece explores the process of perfection from diverse perspectives while simultaneously questioning the role of politics in art through a set of three separate videos.

One of the videos depicts the rehearsal of a play based on the short story “House with a Mezzanine” by Anton Chekov. The story, an extended reflection on the conflict between action and idleness, with an apathetic landscape painter taking the side of idleness, was adapted for the stage and performed by a professional theater team for the video, which shows a selection from the rehearsal process. The video focuses on a small portion of the play, showing the actors and director working to perfect their performances. In order to improve their acting, the performers are constantly told to cut and given new directions by the director.

The theme of the work of perfection is reflected more concretely in a video that records a diamond in the midst of the polishing process. The cutting and polishing of the small diamond echoes the performers at work, receiving criticism from their director. The meticulous process, patiently carried out by the gem-cutter, uses a flame to shape the diamond’s surface; the perfect form is reached through the convergence of crystal and flame, which are described by Calvino in his text as “two forms of perfect beauty that we cannot tear our eyes away from, two modes of growth in time, of expenditure of the matter surrounding them, two moral symbols, two absolutes, two categories for classifying facts and ideas, styles and feelings.”

The third video, shown in a separate area behind the other two, adds even more symbolic depth to the concept of perfection. In this video a chef in a Turkish restaurant works to prepare dinner for a group of diners who sit alone in his restaurant. One of the members of the group tells the bitter story of a little girl, used by her family to smuggle illegal products on a donkey over the border between Syria and Turkey. The storyteller explains that he hopes to shoot a movie of this story one day and that he makes additions to the story, polishes it, each time he tells it. The idea of development as a process is also reflected in the video itself, which is cut to emphasize close-ups on the faces of the storyteller’s audience, rather than the storyteller himself, thereby pushing the viewer to think about the intentions and effects of his art. Unlike Chekhov’s landscape painter, the storyteller emphasizes his belief that one should make an effort to leave something good behind and that art is the perfect medium for doing so.

“Alterity” also features Cavusoglu’s other series, including two large drawings on the floors of the gallery space that take on a third dimension through video cameras located above them and a threefold installation paying homage to French director Robert Bresson’s famous film “Au hazard Balthazar.” The show will run through Nov. 5. For more information, visit www.ergincavusoglu.com and www.rampaistanbul.com.

Martin Herbert
TimeOut London (October 21 - 27 2010)
Ergin Cavusoglu's three-screen installation, 'Crystal & Flame', requires some temporal outlay. The extensive opening section - documenting a filmmaker dining with friends in a Turkish café while a chef mans the grill - turns out to be just an hors d'ouevre for the film next door, featuring a group of actors extensively rehearsing a Chekhov play. (A third section featuring a gem-cutter polishing a diamond is almost ambient, an elliptical commentary on the rest.) Nevertheless, and unexpectedly, you may well stay for the duration.

Through the director's descriptions, the restaurant scene conjures up a fictionalised film drawing attention to the maiming of children by landmines on smuggling runs between Turkey and Syria: his description of its horrific ending is indelible. If this raises the issue of the moral responsibility of the artist, it's counterpointed by the art-for-art's-sake expostulations of the painter character in the Chekhov play, who argues against a Salvation Army-type woman.

Rehearsal and description put play, film, and their embodied positions in a state of potential; Cavusoglu isn't taking sides. The symbols of fire and crystallisation (from the grill to the gemstone, the dramaturgical idea to its realisation), and the verve with which the film director and the actors put their cases, figures the whole as a study in competing ethical energies. Meanwhile, formal and cultural associations reverberate within its triangulated structure. Stealthily satisfying stuff. 

Crystal & Flame
Jonathan Gilhooly
AN Magazine (October 2010)
This new, multi-screen work by Ergin Cavusoglu (commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella) is prefaced by a quotation from Italo Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’:

"Crystal and flame: two forms of perfect beauty that we cannot tear our eyes away from, two modes of growth in time, of expenditure of the matter surrounding them, two moral symbols, two absolutes, two categories for classifying facts and ideas, styles and feelings… A more complex symbol, which has given me greater possibilities of expressing the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglement of human lives, is that of the city."

Calvino’s words set out the material and metaphysical landscape from which Cavusoglu’s piece emerges: two screens—one a cool depiction of the cutting and polishing of a gemstone, the other a convivial restaurant scene—bracket and are counterpoised by a third, a group of actors rehearsing a stage play. Crystal & Flame demands the viewer’s attention, for although the screens can be seen simultaneously, each of the three narratives asks to be absorbed individually. In Peer Gallery the adjacent rooms for this interplay of narratives express the inability to encompass completely their significance: the three into two (il)logic is a fitting echo of the sublime awkwardness of Calvino’s own fictive meta-texts, but at the same time it prompts the viewer to traverse the two spaces in an attempt to tease out meaning. One question might be: how can the rehearsal of a stage play, in which the propulsive thrust of the narrative is constantly interrupted and deferred by the requisite instructions of the director, be seen to elide with the ‘naturally’ unfolding conversation in a Turkish grill, and the release-from-nature paradigm of the gem-cutter’s art? In each film the concept of boundaries, borders, and liminal spaces are played out: between fact and fiction (the restaurant conversation), acting and not-acting (the stage rehearsal), nature and artifice (the stone-cutting sequence).

In the first room the film begins with the restaurant chef lighting an open flame-grill, followed by the arrival of a group of six people who proceed to occupy one of the tables. The informal (and ostensibly unscripted) conversation gravitates towards the recounting, by the chief male character, of a film script outlining the smuggling of goods across the Turkish/Syrian border. This account becomes increasingly tense as the narrator reaches its shocking denouement, the apparently empty restaurant gradually taking on the emotional ambience of a stage set. Interestingly, Cavusoglu has here uncoupled the subtitles from their diegetic source by projecting the spoken text onto a separate, angled ‘letterbox’ surface below the main screen. This adds a further element to the already tripartite arrangement, and makes explicit the artist’s deployment of language as a structural, pliable component within the work.

In the second room the remaining two works are positioned adjacent to one another, the footage of the gem-cutter in his workshop projected onto an angled screen situated on the floor. The viewer is here invited into a different kind of relationship with the subject (the stone itself—we only ever see the cutter’s hands): this meditative film is seen as if under a microscope, or in a display case, its portrayal of material transformation providing an unwavering foil to the more emotive content of the other two pieces. The final screen depicts the rehearsal of a stage adaptation of Chekhov’s ‘An Artist’s Story’ (itself the depiction of a triangular relationship), in which the eponymous lead character becomes fixated with two sisters, one of whom has strong philanthropic principles that contrast with his own unworldly self-interest. The emotional trajectory of the story is constantly interrupted by the director, whose stop-start modulations and suggestions serve as a theatrical correlative to the gem-cutter’s own work-in-progress. Here artifice is foregrounded, but serves to accentuate the emotional impact of the plot—the final scene is affectingly played out three times, a final coda to the triadic structure of the whole. At the same time, this rehearsal itself rehearses the generic form of the first film and seems to question the authenticity of the restaurant scene: the occasional camera shots of empty theatre seats mirror that scene’s vacated dining tables. Similarly, references to jewellery abound in the Turkish grill piece, returning the viewer once again to the stable central image of cut crystal.

Calvino’s notion of rationality and entanglement gives Crystal & Flame its dialectical form, but Cavusoglu’s exposition provides no easy resolution: its themes seem not to have emerged fully formed, but instead to have been genuinely and awkwardly wrought out of the narrative material from which they came. Intractable and compelling, Crystal & Flame leaves the viewer mentally navigating its conceptual spaces long after departing the actual rooms of London’s Peer gallery.

Crystal & Flame
Arnold Barkus
The Global Dispatches(October 2010)
Ergin Cavusoglu's installation "Crystal & Flame" is part of the Free to Air series of exhibitions and events funded by the London Councils that will show throughout the city over a four-year period. The theme of each newly-commissioned project derives from Roosevelt’s ‘four freedoms’ – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

On exhibit until October 30th at PEER, is Crystal and Flame a three channel video installation commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella under the rubric “freedom from want”. London-based artist of Turkish descent, Ergin Cavusoglu has chosen to present an installation that works on multiple thematic levels while also inscribing itself in the social fabric of the city of London.
The artist’s point of departure was a text by the Italian author Italo Calvino, “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” (1988), in which the novelist/essayist charted out a writer’s manifesto well in advance of the new millennium. His six categories or chapters are: lightness, quickness, exactitude, multiplicity, visibility, and finally consistency – a section that was never written due to the untimely death of the author. Cavusoglu embraced Calvino’s juxtaposition of two symbols – crystal and flame – polar forms of aesthetic perfection that we cannot tear our eyes away from. Through precisely filmed images and recorded sound, the artist extrapolates metaphorically on the divergence of these two symbols or absolutes, both aesthetically and morally.

As visitors to Peer enter the first room of the gallery they encounter a video screen depicting a casual dinner scene amongst guests at a Turkish grill restaurant. The verité styled document focuses on one man’s ad hoc recounting of a harrowing tale of children used to smuggle goods across the border between Syria and Turkey over terrain riddled with landmines. Meanwhile, viewers can peer into a second room where two other videos are projected simultaneously.
The smaller of the two screens in this second room is set on an angled platform and depicts in meticulous detail the handling and cutting of a raw stone into a commercially marketable diamond of exquisite beauty. The third screen shows a filmed rehearsal for a theater play based on a Chekhov short story. Freedom from want, as a theme, is grappled with directly by four actors, most blatantly in an argument about philanthropy between a landscape painter and a woman raising funds to aid victims injured by a series of forest fires. This screen is, in various ways, Crystal and Flame’s vortex where meanings and dissonances resonate. As a rehearsal for a stage play, we are witness to a work-in-progress, similar to the diamond cutter’s buffing and polishing of his cold raw stone. The fiery emotions of stage-actors, harnessed by director Robert Delamere, are meanwhile juxtaposed with the simpler restaurant scene in which dinner guests are un-self-consciously just being themselves as they listen to a true-life story.

In many ways, Cavusoglu’s work is faithful to the Calvino manifesto that inspired him. While driven by a complexity of themes, there is a lightness that Calvino would have approved of. When seeking an answer as to how multi-tasking can be acceptable within literature, Calvino turns to “brevity” as a key to allow the writer to “unite density of invention with a sense of infinite possibilities.” Those viewing the installation at PEER will be torn between three competing screens vying for their attention, each riveting in its own way. Each viewer will therefore also walk away uniquely affected. But what will undoubtedly remain consistent is the artist’s provocation to each viewer to read his work for its intended themes while remaining open to an infinite sense of wonder and possibility. The sixth and last chapter of Calvino’s manifesto was to be called “consistency”. In many ways, the multi-tasking “Crystal and Flame” forges a balance and strikes a tone within complexity, thus aesthetically performing the missing chapter of Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”.

Melissa Gronlund, Frieze (April 2009) 
‘There is no Road…’ also effected, perhaps despite itself, a separate critique of Romanticism: one of simply eroding and effacing its charm through repetition. All paths, all paths, are superficially similar – a convention in Aranberri’s work aimed to examine. Ergin Cavusoglu’s lush painterly video Fog Walking (2007), meanwhile, best encapsulated the frustration involved in this monotony. It was made when Cavusoglu was in Biarritz during ten straight days of fog, and is set to The Firebird Suite (1910) by Igor Stravinsky, who worked in the area between 1922 and 1924. The symphony crescendos with the image of a sunrise, which is set in the first third iof the film, thus creating a peak that ultimately signifies nothing: a morning but with no change in the foggy landscape or the rhythm of the editing. The video addressed Romanticism by running it into the ground – letting it tire itself out on its own loop of rehearsal, steadily losing climatic and symbolic potential in an ever-growing build-up of constraint and claustrophobia.

David Terrien, ‘There is no Road’ Art Review (March 2009)
A haunting video shot by Ergin Cavusoglu in stormy weather on the French coast near Biarritz (Fog Walking, 2007) comes across as painterly in its slow movements and obscured views but provides on of the few aural points of reference within the hushed, darkened galleries, the work’s otherwise almost silent looped soundtrack climaxing every seven minutes or so in the horns of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite (1911).

Ergin Cavusoglu
Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Translated by Rosanne Altstatt
Michael Hübl, Frieze (October 2008) 
The first thing you hear is the clatter of a train. Even before you enter the Kunstverein Freiburg’s large, darkened exhibition space housing the Bulgarian-born Turkish artist Ergin Çavusoglu’s solo exhibition ‘Place after Place’, you are confronted by a the soundtrack of Midnight Express (2008), which sounds like it’s from another era. From speakers at the entrance of the exhibition, railway carriages can be heard rumbling over a switch – an anachronistic noise in the age of high-speed train travel.
The show’s central work, on the other hand, the video installation Point of Departure (2006), thrusts the exhibition into the modern age. Composed of six synchronized projections arranged to form two rectangles with three audio channels, the work re-creates an airport environment: the tedious security controls, the interminable waiting, the fleeting contacts. Çavus¸og¹lu’s images are not taken from large international air traffic hubs, however; rather, the artist filmed at London’s suburban Stansted Airport and at the airport in Trabzon, a city on the Turkish coast of the Black Sea. Both locations are destinations for budget flights, and Çavusoglu’s work emphasizes this. One long tracking shot shows a row of aircraft all bearing the logo of budget carrier Ryanair. In the image of these grounded aircraft, Point of Departure could foreshadow a future in which rising oil prices would force budget flights to be discontinued, and such sights will seem part of a bygone era.
The contradictions, losses and latent tensions of globalization and migration are the thematic current of Çavusoglu’s work. Point of Departure calls attention to the sometimes-irrational procedures that dictate our movements in airport terminals – even though these exchanges are organized according to specific rules. Airports employ cutting-edge technology, yet the use of X-ray scanning machines is motivated largely by a relatively uncontrollable psychology: fear. Çavusoglu lets this ambivalent correlation be felt in his work. The artist films bulky bags and crammed plastic sacks tumbling out of the baggage system while a crush of older Turkish women dressed in muted-coloured robes grab for their belongings, accompanied by a threatening thumping sound, like a rapid heartbeat.
But the suspense leads nowhere. No one is exposed; there is no arrest; no bomb suddenly explodes. Instead, the artist visualizes subtler tensions: the Turkish women in their inconspicuous dress stand in stark contrast to the casual demeanour of a computer-toting man (played by the artist himself) from the mobile Western middle class who ambles through the goings-on. He makes a conspicuous counterpoint to the women’s crutches, canes and humble baggage. Two types of culture clearly meet here, but Çavusoglu does not pit one against the other. The laptop-wielding man is not presented as the hero of a new age, nor are the physically less able women deemed part of a dying breed. Instead, what becomes apparent in Çavusoglu’s work is how unconstrained they seem – as if the security apparatus and controls don’t bother them at all.
Identifying instances in which seeming anachronisms coexist in modern spaces is a recurring theme in Çavusoglu’s work. Globalization has been accompanied by an intense acceleration of existence that is inescapable. Air travel, for instance, allows people to leave their homelands to find better living conditions, but their new surroundings do not necessarily quench the need for cultural and social belonging. Çavusoglu repeatedly brings these kinds of losses back into view, but he also shows how resistant and persistent some habits and traditions are. In his video installation Silent Glide (2008), two lovers are captured in the midst of a quarrel. When the male protagonist quotes from Leo Tolstoy’s memoirs, or when his partner assumes the attitude of a spoiled young aristocrat, it seems that this scene could just as easily have taken place 100 years ago. The dispute plays out against the backdrop of the shipping channels across the Sea of Marmara, while a bleak vista of the cement factory in the Turkish city of Hereke can be viewed through the window of the room in which the couple is arguing. The dust-grey construction site offers no hint that sumptuous silk carpets have been knotted in this city for centuries. Çavus¸og¹lu successfully sustains a sense that something here is not right, something far graver than a relationship crisis. The fragile, white model ship that the artist repeatedly introduces into the frame becomes a symbol of this troubled feeling, triggering associations with the ghost ship Flying Dutchman and other tales of disaster on the high seas. Such notions could suggest something poetic, even romantic, yet Çavusoglu keeps a vision of harsh contemporary reality firmly in focus throughout. Frequently, his aesthetic precision lends Çavusoglu’s work an air of inconspicuous normality. Yet behind every image, every scene, nothing is certain, everything is in motion; nothing is more than a fragile construction. 

Ergin Cavusoglu
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK
Jonathan Griffin
‘Ergin Cavusoglu’, Frieze (September 2006) 
The city of Trabzon sits on the coast of the Black Sea, 100 miles from Georgia and 200 miles from Iran, at the south-east corner of Turkey. With one foot in Europe and another in Asia, Turkey is, geo-politically, an apt location for Ergin Cavusoglu to focus on in his 2006 work Point of Departure. The six-screen video installation is shot at both Trab–zon and Stansted airport in England, gateways at opposite ends of what Cavusoglu terms ‘the European idea’. His camera follows two travellers: one a Turkish graduate student touching down in England on his way ‘further west’, and the other a British journalist on her way to the Middle East.
Airports are often seen as quintessential non-places – halls through which somnambulant travellers are ushered with as little fuss as the architects and ground staff can arrange. Having passed through passport control and baggage-check into ‘air side’, you are technically neither in a country nor out of it. Cavusoglu’s installation played on this indeterminacy, emphasized by a soundtrack in which the background noise of echoing footfalls, trolleys, squeaks and electronic beeps forms a relentless aural cloud over the work. The real subject of his work, however, is not globalized homogeneity but difference, articulating the specifics of place through details. By focusing on hair-styles, signage, tea and manners he picks out visible flotsam that reveals the cultural undercurrents passing beneath the surface.
Like the projection of an X-ray luggage scanner screen which sends translucent images of personal effects across the gallery floor, Cavusoglu’s footage deliberately evokes the cold stare of the CCTV image. The two characters in the film are actors, and their studiedly casual behaviour is that of people who know they are under surveillance, doing their best to act naturally. Cavusoglu’s method is one of emulation; in recording the airport he adopts its techniques of monitoring, recreating its atmosphere of listlessness edged with paranoia. Unlike Mark Wallinger’s transcendental airport video Threshold to the Kingdom (2000), Point of Departure is not an easy work to watch. It was impossible to see all six screens simultaneously, and the viewer had to shift around the space for the 32 minutes of its duration, enduring the fatigue of audio-visual bustle while waiting for the narrative scraps that infrequently emerge.
A similar sense of watchfulness pervades Adrift (2006), in which two adjacent pairs of projections play out footage shot in Europe (Antwerp Station is occasionally recognizable) and the USA (New York and Rhode Island). Journeys again provide an unambiguous meta-theme; yachts and aeroplanes edge slowly across the screen; cities are filmed from the windows of moving trains. Cavusoglu uses these motifs to knit together a visual essay on the transport of ideas and taste. Antwerp’s station, built by Louis Delacenserie in 1905, is famously pompous, borrowing Renaissance, Moorish, and Byzantine styles in its magpie pursuit of grandeur. New York’s Carnegie Hall and the New England mansions that Cavusoglu films, built by 19th-century industrialist settlers, are no less indebted to European ideas of refinement and prestige in their form and purpose. A simple, repetitive soundtrack (a few notes borrowed from Bach) and melancholy shots of people waiting or wandering aimlessly evoke the swells and currents of the ocean that divides the two continents.
The porosity of borders is also alluded to in Dissonant Rhythms (2004), a two-screen projection consisting of a series of static shots; a World War I military base outside Antwerp and a series of World War II bunkers nearby. Despite the 30-odd years that divide their construction, it is difficult to
tell them apart. Their concrete surfaces suffer similar scarring, and as the undergrowth begins to absorb them into the forest the details of their histories retreat. While few people today would remember such structures being used, their lumpen presence in forgotten corners across Europe still sits darkly in the continent’s collective consciousness. Cavusoglu describes, like boats on the ocean, the ways we are subject to currents of history beyond our control.

‘Ergin Cavusoglu: Point of Departure’
Stephen Riley, AN Magazine (July 2006)
It is a cliché of current times that ‘we are all members of diaspora now’. Whether that stands close scrutiny is debatable. However, as the skies are criss-crossed with aircraft carrying business people, pleasure seekers and refugees, it is clear that something has changed, even from half a generation ago. In the Global Village we are all permanently on the move, and we are all familiar with the stress and tedium of airports.
The eponymous ‘Point of Departure’ comprises five projections on translucent screens, with a sixth projected onto the floor. The screens, wich feature scenes from two airports, create an architectural space through which the viewer can pass. Characters meet at Stansted and Trabzon in Turkey: airports at the Atlantic and Asian fringes of Europe. There is a hint of narrative, but nothing conclusive. The familiar experience of X-ray baggage checks, metal detectors and PA announcements is played out. The sleek steel and glass architecture of Stansted is visibly different from the cream and grey municipal style of Trabzon, but the experience is essentially the same.
Adrift is the second major piece in the show. Four screens change continually: city streets, grand buildings, people walking, tube trains departing; in the background the city’s noise is coupled with portentous-sounding music. Kids swing on a scaffold. The moon appears in the night sky and then vanishes. Tourists in a museum study an architect’s model. A jet flies (now ominously) over the New York skyline. A yacht floats serenely by in a seascape.
Equivalence to the real experience of contemporary spaces is created. One becomes aware of the partial understanding one has of a complex space, in which information is gathered and filtered because there is too much to take in. This also draws attention to our relationships with art and screens: an expectation of conventional narrative is created, but the sequences refuse to offer this. The egalitarian qualities of the screens override the natural mental filters through which we attend to some things and eliminate others, and each of the scenes with its potential for meaning or meaningless demands equal attention.

Ergin Cavusoglu - Sunderland
Robert Clark
The Guide, The Guardian (18 February 2006)
Born in Bulgaria as part of a Turkish minority, the internationally-renowned video artist Ergin Cavusoglu has made geographical and cultural estrangement the central business of his work. He charts no-man's zones, interstates, border lines, airport customs desks. Such places are imbued with a fearful thrill and frissons of dread. Downward Straights is a haunting sequence of observations of nocturnal ships passing through the Bosphorus. Tahtakale documents the incongruous business of a currency market in a huge baroque building. Central to this exhibition is a specially commissioned six-screen installation contrasting the goings-on at London's Stansted Airport and Trabzon Airport in Turkey. These in-between landscapes are familiar to most, yet largely ignored by art.

Neil Mulholland ‘British Art Show 6’
Flash Art(January – February 2006)
The latter begins auspiciously with two multi-screen video installations: Ergin Cavusoglu’s Tahtakale (2004), which invocates the atmosphere of a currency trading black market in Istanbul, …

Stuart Coomer, ‘London’
Artforum (December 2005)
Almost half of the participants in this year’s show, which was curated by Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker, were born outside the UK, and most now live and work in London, including Ergin Cavusoglu, a Turkish video artist whose statement in the show’s catalogue seems a relevant corollary to the city’s emotional tenor in 2005. Cavusoglu suggests how being under surveillance makes one more acutely conscious of one’s location and movement in space: “When I came to live in Turkey and then in London, under totally different conditions, I had to define a new territory, and define myself within that territory.”

David Briers, ‘Something of the Night’
Art Monthly (December – January 05-06)
In Ergin Cavusoglu’s four-screen video installation (seen at the 2004 Beck’s Futures show) silhouetted ships slide silently through the Bosphorus against a continually absorbing backdrop of the distant street lights and traffic movement of Istanbul. But both videos have an unsettling underside.

Andrew Hunt
Frieze (January – February 2006)
Shown next door to Martin’s film, contemporary reflections on everyday life in video works such as Rosalind Nashashibi’s Hreash House (2004), which represents the comings and going of life in Nazareth, and Ergin Cavusoglu’s Tahtkale (2004), which shows black market currency traders in an Istanbul bazaar, are thoughtful and provocative, yet one can’t help wondering how interesting some of the video work – with its occasional lazy lapse into a kind of faux documentary approach – really is.

Adrian Searle ‘State of the art '
The Guardian (27 September 2005)
Ergin Cavusoglu went to film the black-market money dealers in Istanbul.
As much as these works reflect the fact that film and video have now become dominant ways of working, they are all in a sense elegiac encounters with places, people, cultures. Conversations in Nashashibi's film are untranslated, and the camera hovers over dinners, siestas and calls to prayer. The haggling in Istanbul market is full of threat and ambiguity: "I buy all sorts ... Exact, I've got exact euros ... there's definitely going to be a crisis, definitely a crisis!" Over the voices Cavusoglu has superimposed a solemn Byzantine ecclesiastical chant. You feel the complexity of the world.

Arifa Akbar, ‘As Hirst hits 40, meet new faces of UK art scene’, The Independent (06 June 2005)
The new faces of the contemporary British art scene are revealed today - and they hail from countries as far afield as Guyana, Bulgaria and Canada. The international range of artists selected for the prestigious British Art Show reflects how London's art scene is fast usurping New York and European cities as the place to be.
Rising stars of contemporary art.
ERGIN CAVUSOGLU
Born in Bulgaria in 1968, he graduated from the University of Marmara, Istanbul, in 1994, and from Goldsmiths College, London, a year later. He now lives and works in London and he has had solo shows both in Britain and Turkey. He was short-listed for the Beck's Futures Prize last year for a video installation that included close shots of oil tankers crossing the Bosphorus Strait in the dead of night.

Steven Bode, ‘Not Fade Away…’ 
Contemporary (Issue 71 2005)
In the week of writing this piece, London seemed especially illuminated with new video shows: Catherine Yass’s riveting and unremitting documentary study of Israel’s new ‘security’ barrier at the Alison Jacques gallery; Dryden Goodwin’s haunting landscape vignettes at Stephen Friedman; Ergin Cavusoglu’s equally lyrical multi-projection installations at Haunch of Venison; Joan Jonas’s still-vibrant genus of video, dance and performance at Wilkinson and (love her or hate her) Sam Taylor-Wood crying a river at White Cube.

Kutlug Ataman
The Daily Telegraph (18 December 2004)
The most memorable viewing experience was Downward Straits, a video installation by Ergin Cavusoglu, shown during the Beck’s Features exhibition at the ICA. It involved close shots of oil tankers crossing the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul in the dead of the night. The sound involved wireless messages in between control towers. The piece documented a somewhat sinister activity with intense poetry and beauty. It evoked a multitude of emotions, more than you would get from a multi-million dollar film.

Craig Burnett
The Guide, The Guardian (23-29 October 2004)
The rich and mesmerising visual style of Cavusoglu's video installations, such as Downward Straits, shown at this year's Becks' Futures, have attracted a lot of attention recently, probably because his work has an intensity that sets it apart from the dominant documentary style of video or photo-based art. Tahtakale is a four-screen installation that portrays a group of market traders going about their business in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar while, on another screen, labourers queue to receive goods. Poised In The Infinite Ocean was shot around the Bay of Biscay and shows a lighthouse and seaside chateau being buffeted by a storm. The videos are infused with mourning, as if the intimate human presence is an ephemeral thing within a larger structure, whether nature or capitalism, and Cavusoglu seems motivated by a desire to capture moments and places as they become obliterated by these implacable forces.

Peter Chapman
‘Nahum Tevet & Ergin Cavusoglu’ Independent, Going Out (11-17 September 2004)
In the opening scenes of Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, helicopters sweep low over Los Angeles, they are only spraying insecticide, but it feels like an invasion. Ergin Cavusoglu’s new multi-screen installation, Entanglement, also sees helicopters as a kind of threat from above.
The Bulgarian-born Cavusoglu is drawn to film in marginalised and fraught locations. Once there, he records the helicopters flying overhead at night: you can hear them roaming about, but they’re hard to see.

Reviewed by Catriona Black, ‘Outer Limits’
Sunday Herald (19 September 2004)
Two works of art are currently holding the monopoly on DCA’s sizeable gallery space. One of them sends you running for cover, and the other lures you into forbidden territory. One surrounds you, while the other won’t let you in. One is video, the other a mass of plywood. They are worlds apart, but what connects them is the subtle sense that each is deeply rooted in the history of painting.
Ergin Cavusoglu, a Bulgarian-Turkish artist based in London, was once a mural painter, with classical concerns about the relationship between painting and architectural space. He has wrapped six video screens around the walls of a room at DCA, creating a moving mural which transforms the space into an infinite expanse of night sky. Baroque painters employed the same tricks 400 years ago, but where their skies were billowing with elegant angels, Cavusoglu’s are occupied with whirring helicopters. Both are symbols of a greater, all-seeing power from which you can’t escape.
You know they’re helicopters before you even see them, thanks to the malevolent soundtrack creeping around the darkened corners of the entrance corridor. The layered audio of purring blades can’t fail to put you on your guard as you edge your way in. Ever seen a mouse in the middle of a room? At the merest suggestion of danger, it’ll head for cover. The same instinct will grip you in Cavusoglu’s installation.
You may have seen some of this artist’s work earlier in the year, as part of the Beck’s Futures exhibition at CCA in Glasgow. If so, you’ll know his concern is with surveillance, and the ambiguities of public and private space. Growing up in communist Bulgaria, Cavusoglu has had first-hand experience of life with Big Brother, but it’s far too easy to blame the reds and leave it at that. The fact is that he didn’t have to go as far as Bulgaria to find surveillance helicopters to film. There were plenty available in east London. The searchlights rake the night sky, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be irrationally scared of being picked out. If you can manage to stand your ground long enough, it becomes clear that minus their sound, these helicopters are almost entirely abstract. Their structures are visible only in a few quick frames, and otherwise all you see is lights, dancing yellow, red and blue against a pure black backdrop. There are no reference points in the ground or the sky. There are no human faces appearing in any cockpit. Entanglement is a moving abstract painting which absolutely dominates the space you’re in.
It takes a bit of adjustment time (comprising possible wobbling and guaranteed gormless blinking) to go straight from the oppressive, buzzing darkness of Entanglement into the bright, sunlit space of Nahum Tevet’s Seven Walks. The large gallery comfortably houses a sprawling mini-metropolis of painted plywood structures, all vaguely redolent of broken household furniture. 
Like Cavusoglu, the Israeli artist showed at last year’s Venice Biennale. Judging by the current crop of shows in Scotland, there must be one year’s turnaround time between spotting an international talent and installing them in your gallery. 

Moira Jeffrey, ‘It’s all in the mind’
The Herald (3 September 2004)
So don't be put off if the names Ergin Cavusoglu and Nahum Tevet don't mean much to you. Cavusoglu, is the London-based Bulgarian artist whose luminous film of the Bosphorus at night was a highlight of the recent Beck's Futures exhibition. Tevet is a prominent Israeli artist and teacher, whose work has been seen in Lyon, Pittsburgh and Venice, but never in the UK. 
Their concurrent shows in Dundee are both elegant and complex, containing more social implications than their apparently formal appearances apparently might allow. 
Neither show is sensational, each has a kind of quiet authority: Cavusoglu as a youngish artist reaching his stride, Tevet as a mature 58-year-old at the culmination of a recent body of work that has occupied him for seven years.
Cavusoglu's work, Entanglement, is a six-screen video installation that covers three walls in a darkened room. Stepping into it you are surrounded by a mysterious son et lumiére: lights dance around you, there is a low thrum. It is only gradually that you realise that this rather beautiful entertainment, like an abstract painting come to three- dimensional life, is actually the sight and sound of police helicopters in night-time pursuit. 
You are thrown back into movie clichés; the bombast of Apocalypse Now with its soundtrack of the ride of the Valkyries, the moment in 1984 when a moment of intimacy between Winston and his lover is rudely shattered by a terrifying helicopter at the window, the glamour of Al Pacino in Heat. You think of helicopter gunships in modern warfare and their role in peacetime supervision and policing. The footage is real, shot in the east end of London. 
It is beautiful sinister and somehow stirring.

Martin Coomer 'Lager tops'
Time Out London (7-14 April 2004)
Beck's Futures begins with a nocturnal chug down the Bosphorus and ends - or at least my visit ended - with an interminable wait, in Seattle, for a train. To watch Ergin Cavusoglu's video, 'Downward Straits', you walk between screens. On either side of you shadowy vessels glide past, obscuring the twinkling lights of the shoreline. One view is of the east bank from the west, the other focuses on the west from the east. We're in the no man's-land that divides the European and Asian parts of Istanbul - 'a passageway for ships carrying cargoes, smuggled goods and human trafficking', the handout reminds us.
Brought up in Bulgaria as part of the Turkish minority and now based in London, Cavusoglu obviously brings to this work highly personal understanding of migration.
However, in his quietly impressive, understated installation, one thinks less of the specifics of time and place on screen than of journeys in general; what might be darkly sinister, or politically motivated, is also beautifully hypnotic.

Adrian Searle 'Full steam ahead '
The Guardian (30 March 2004)
Like Cross's work, Ergin Cavusoglu's four-screen video installation is meant to make us think about cargo, traffic, distances. It is night, and silhouetted ships cross the screens, against the city lights, making their way through the Bosphorus at Istanbul, Europe's crossing into Asia. The backwash slops rhythmically against the shore, and a pilot's radio conversations murmur quietly. The spotlit mosques, the anonymous passage of the shipping, the winking lights of the hillsides are all mesmerising. We are caught between the screens, as though in our own straits. We think about the man on one bank, looking towards the other with his camera. He can record only what is visible - and yet he is also recording something else. Now living in London, Cavusoglu is an ethnic Turk, born and brought up in Bulgaria. Downward Straits, then, can be seen as a journey through his own life, his own crossings, his own place between places. It is an extremely beautiful work. 
There are dozens of artists working like Cross and Cavusoglu now, their cameras aimed at the everyday, a place, an event. This work is less documentary than poetic description, a restaging of the world, homing in on details, places and moments. It matters what is filmed, the ways things are edited and projected, the viewpoint itself. This is why these two artists stand out. In the wrong hands, such a method of enquiry can be anecdotal and dull.

Sophia Phoca, 'Britannia Works' 
Contemporary (Issue 65 2004) 
Ergin Cavusoglu's video Street Dance (2003) illicitly documents life outside his window, where semi-closed blinds reveal a group of boys dancing around a car. The voyeuristic camera provokes a sense of anxiety as it uncomfortably draws the viewers' attention to the similar scene being played out downstairs.

Waldemar Januszczak
The Sunday Times, Culture (28 March 2004)
... Ergin Cavusoglu continues to mix art with surveillance, creating a mini video Bosphorus for us, through which all manner of suspicious ships appear to be sneaking at night. Is this really a secretive and magical show? Or am I imagining it?

Rod Liddle, 'Tosh and Beck's'
The Times (27 March 2004)
On the numerous video installations, you should not miss Ergin Cavusoglu's Downward Straits, a gentle and mesmerising nighttime video loop of ships sailing silently down the Bosphorus, or the equally conventional (and, uh, accessible) Delicate Balance by his Turkish compatriot HalukAkakce.

Moira Jeffrey
'Space is the artistic frontier', The Herald (26 March 2004)
Ergin Cavusoglu's Downward Straits is a haunting night view of the Bosphorus. Standing between four screens, you watch transport ships glide in dark silhouette up the river.You are standing on the border between east and west, lights glow, worlds collide and all around you people and goods shift silently.

Tim Dowling 'Art show that's far from uniform'
The Guardian (24 March 2004)
While some of the work may not be ingratiating, there is a calm, non-confrontational feel to the show: from Philipsz's piped-in, one finger piano rendition of the theme from Don't Look Now to Bulgarian-born Ergin Cavosoglu's walk-through, four-screen video of the Bosphorus Strait filmed surreptitiously at night. It represents a definite move away from dead sharks and unmade beds.

Michael Corris, '3. Berlin Biennale'
Art Monthly (April 2004)
Ergin Cavusoglu, a Bulgarian artist living and working in London, created a disorienting, menacing video installation of a night-time scrambling of helicopters, hovering in the sky while sweeping the ground below with searchlights.

Thomas W. Eller
‘Berlin in Winter’ Artnet (20 February 2004)
Thankfully, some works went beyond the level of commentary and created a presence in their own right. Ergin Cavusoglu's video of helicopters at night opens the viewer's imagination. Whatever allusions it contains and whatever explanation might be given to justify the existence of this projection, it quietly sinks in, to become one of show's lasting visual impressions

Sara Arrhenius, ‘8th International Istanbul Biennial’
Artforum (January 2004), p.151
In Ergin Cavusoglu’s video installation Entanglement, 2003, helicopter searchlights in the night sky produce a beautiful play of light and color against a sound track of airplanes and sirens.

Eleanor Heartney, ‘Mending the Breach’
Art in America (December 2003), p.78
Bulgarian-born, London-based artist Ergin Cavusoglu traded on a similar unease in a video installation titled Entanglement (2003) that plunged the viewer into a dark room lit by helicopter searchlights and pierced with the sounds of planes and sirens.

Time Out London No. 1736 (November 26-December 3 2003)
Ergin Cavusoglu’s videos of night-time cities have an abstract poetry unrelated to their voyeuristic subject matter; …

Robert C. Morgan, ‘Whose Justice? Reflections on the Istanbul Biennial 2003’
NY Arts Magazine (October 2003)
One of the most striking multiple-screen video installations was by the Turkish artist, Ergin Cavusoglu, entitled Entanglement (2003). In the dark spaces of the continuous screen, one hears the roar of engines and the bobbing lights, presumably of jets in the process of landing. The aura is mysterious, but riveting. If other forms of "political art" were capable of finding this balance – where poetry is felt as real, instead of academically imposed – the direction of Biennials would become something more and, at the same time, something less. In this sense, quality –whether in art or politics -- is never really out of date.