Point of Departure (2006)

Six channel synchronized PAL video, three channel sound, 31’ 36”. Installation view Kunstverein Freiburg, 2008

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