PLACE AFTER PLACE (2008)
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 reflect Cavusoglu'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.
