Empire /after Andy Warhol/ (2008)

Single channel (1080i) HD video, sound, 9’43”

Empire (after Andy Warhol) reframes an ordinary building in reference to the representation of an iconicized structure, while shifting from the global to the local. Borrowing his title from Andy Warhol's film 'Empire', which consists of a single shot of the Empire State Building and runs 8 hours and 6 minutes and chronicles the passage from day to night, Çavuşoğlu's video rather echoes the 'space of current relations', associated with notions of temporal and spatial continuity in which the concepts of domestic comfort are unsettled through an unrelenting gaze. Çavuşoğlu's film captures in a static shot the transition from day to night surrounding a residential apartment block, thus reframing the extant strangeness of a minaret rising through the roof of the apartment. The flats in the block, built a quarter of a century ago in Karabük (Turkey), remain occupied and the main part of the mosque with the prayer room for worshipping is situated in the basement of the apartment. Illuminating light abruptly goes dark, generating a different register through a moment of interruption where we witness something different, 'another truth'. 
(Excerpt from theTemporary Zones exhibition text at Open Space, Vienna, January 2008)