Silent Glide (2008)
Three-channel synchronised (1080i) HD video, sound, 25’
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.
Dr Brigitte Franzen - Vorständin der Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung
Artes Mundi 4(Artes Mundi Prize Limited, 2010) catalogue text excerpt.
The work takes its cue from Leo Tolstoy memoir ‘A Confession’, which describes Tolstoy’s inner struggles and search for the philosophical meaning of life and its righteousness. The scenes showing the downward spiral of their relationship are set against the dim industrial landscape of Hereke, Turkey. Once renowned for the production of the finest silk carpets, a destination for the noble and wealthy, nowadays the landscape is dominated by the malaise of the cement factory and the freighter's port. This setting contains all the poetic ingredients for the main character to enable him to create, and ultimately becomes his point of departure.