Empire (after Andy Warhol), 2009. 9’43”
The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks, Turkey
Rumanian artist Ergin Cavusoglu transforms a unique image into a multiplicity of meanings: time passing and quotes on A. Warhol’s unique cinema takes. The following text, written by Cavusoglu himself, accounts for the value of the work he presents in this opportunity:
Empire (after Andy Warhol) is a single channel video that explores the constructs of ideas on place, non-place and placelessness.
The work reframes an ordinary building in reference to the representation of an iconicized structure, while shifting from the global to the local. Borrowing its 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, my single channel 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.
The footage 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'.
In several of my works an edifice becomes theatrical and embodied in mobility in a metaphoric sense. Not as a décor, but as an actor on a theatrical stage. Although static, the changes taking place in the surrounding landscape/exterior act as the ultimate performative and transient elements within the image. I believe that an image presented in an art context should have a degree of poetry embedded within it. I also like seeing these images as informing other images of truth.
Ergin Cavusoglu (Targoviste, Romania, 1968). Lives and works in London. In the early 1980s, Ergin Çavusoglu studied at The National School of Fine Arts. He consequently received a BA in mural painting from the University of Marmara, Istanbul, an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD from University in Portsmouth. He represented Turkey at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. He was shortlisted for the Beck`s Futures Prize in 2004, and most recently in 2010 for Artes Mundi 4 - the U.K'.s largest contemporary arts prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Ergin Çavusoglu, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Place after Place, Kunstverein Freiburg, Quintet Without Borders, ShContemporary, Shanghai and Haunch of Venison, Zurich, Point of Departure, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and NGCA Sunderland, and Entanglement, DCA, Dundee. Group exhibitions include The First Mediterranean Biennial of Contemporary Art, Haifa, Israel, All Inclusive - A Tourist World, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Between Borders, MARCO Vigo, the 8th Istanbul Biennial, British Art Show 6 and the 3rd Berlin Biennial.
www.ergincavusoglu.com