exhibitions
archive 2006

Artist's' Interview

Find out more about the exhibition, the artist and his work in a special 25 minute interview between Stephen Foster, Director, John Hansard Gallery and Ergin Çavusoglu. This can be viewed here as a video, downloaded as an audio file or podcast , and is also available in transcription.

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Interview transcription:

SF Ergin Çavusoglu welcome. Welcome to the John Hansard Gallery interview. We have agreed that we are going to share copyright on this interview. I hope that’s OK.

EC Thank you.

SF We are delighted that your installation of video works is taking place here at the present time, and there is amongst the three works, a new piece of work that was especially commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella and the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art in Sunderland. I wonder if you would tell us a bit about that work.

EC Yes. The piece that was initially commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella is called “Point of Departure”, and it is a multiple screen piece, filmed in two locations. Part of it is filmed in the UK at Stansted airport and part of it is filmed in Trabzon, which is in North East Turkey, not far from the Georgian border. It is a video installation which has kind of narrative structure to it, but ultimately it is quite abstract, it is quite non-linear in its structure. So there is a way of navigating within the piece. There are clues to what is happening, what can happen. But effectively, it’s more of an experience than actually like a movie. The way the installation is installed, it is offering the viewer an architectural space which they can navigate in or around it, as the case may be.

SF I would like to come back to that a little later, how you approach a video installation, but one of the first things that fascinated me was – is it scripted?

EC Script? Yes there is a script behind it and the script was devised for various reasons. It was partly to do with production. It’s a piece that I started working on mid-90’s probably. ’97 or ’98. The first time I filmed it was at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and this is how it started, how the idea started developing. Obviously through time and through events which happened in Europe and America in 2000, I had to revise some of the ideas, and eventually I ended up with some narrative structure, with a story within it. I just thought that I would need to tell the story through the eyes of a couple of characters. They are not really characters like in a film as such, but they just carry on some of the ideas behind the piece.
SF And do you use actors?

EC Yes. I had to use actors for this particular piece. I had to write a couple of dialogues for them. There was very little in terms of dialogue, it is more to do with the acting ability which is portrayed in the film. But the whole idea was that effectively they will be acting as if in real life, you know. It is almost like a documentary. In actual fact they had to learn not to act.

SF So was it genuinely filmed in Stansted?

EC It is genuinely in Stansted. It is genuinely on what is called air side, which is after you go through Customs and Passport Control, so it is within the real airport environment and in Trabzon, as a matter of fact we only had one actor, and everybody else is real.

SF So the security guards really are security guards and so on?

EC The security guards are, but obviously they were told specific things, and we had to – we didn’t rehearse, but then I basically just wanted them to forget there was a camera, so they had to behave in the normal way.
SF And do you actually create a story board?

EC For this particular piece, everything was story-boarded in very much detail. Partially because of the restraints of the environment where we had to film. It’s quite – it’s a narrow place and obviously we were being watched all the time, because this is the nature of the airport and so we had to be very efficient and we had to be very much on time.

SF Presumably there was an awful lot of technical work you had to do in advance, dealing with security issues and so on.

EC The production of the piece took almost 12 months. We had been actually talking to people in Stanstead, Local Authorities, and at the Airport in Turkey, it took about six months just to get permission for us to be allowed within the place to film.

SF So moving on a little, I am interested in the level of political content in the work. It is clear that there is an underlying political point to much of this, and especially, for example, as this piece is made from the two opposite ends of Europe.

EC It is definitely a facet within the piece. I mean the political probably comes from just the nature of being at an airport – the fact that you are filming at the so-called non-place which is doesn’t belong geographically to one place or to the other. It is a place of the departure really and it is already loaded with meaning, and as a matter of fact, the main themes within the work, like migration, emigration, surveillance, being under scrutiny, are politicizing itself anyway, so you cannot avoid the piece. Whether it is to do with personal politics, whether it is to do with more global issues, and as you mention, I have chosen two end points of the European idea, like Britain and the Eastern part of Turkey which, if Turkey joins the EU in ten years time, this will become the frontier – the end point of Europe. The other reason I chose an airport is at the same time it’s on the coast so it is actually facing the old Soviet Union, which has had a meaning, a kind of personal meaning to do with me and my past. I grew up in the Soviet Régime as such in Bulgaria, so it’s the little things reflecting my old personal experience.

SF Exactly. A lot of work has been done on non-place. Writers like Marc Augé have described it quite fully, and there is a political aspect to that, but there is also a sense of the conscious self as well. Identity is challenged by being in these kind of non-place places, and airports indeed – Augé’s description of Du Pont walking around an airport is an exact location where one enters into a kind of limbo and one’s own identity comes under question.

EC It is a temporal space. It is a place where people just pass through.

SF We’re not doing something.

EC We don’t call it home. We don’t belong there. It is just a transitional place. But as a matter of fact it is not really a non-place, it is quite a real place, it is a place where as a matter of fact it is very much of a place because you become much more conscious of yourself, and you are much more aware of the whole experience I was talking about earlier - you are much more aware of being surveyed and being under scrutiny. So you can call it a place as such. What I was trying to do here is to actually define it; to define the two airports being places, being two separate places; they belong to the same idea. They are transitional places, whether you go from East to West or West to East. But nevertheless, I tried to differentiate the two places through the way it is being filmed, the way the characters act – or the real life characters where people navigate within the spaces.

SF So the second piece in the exhibition is also a new piece four screen installation called “Adrift”. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that piece.

EC “Adrift” is an interesting piece in relation to the way it was devolved. It’s not really a counterpoint to Departure, but it has a very different structure. It evolved very differently. Both pieces have very poetic elements in the way it has been shot. But in “Adrift” everything works in much looser associations. It was filmed across Europe, and partially it was filmed in the United States, and there is a kind of a storyline. It does tell a story about drifting characters and people departing in their own way, but it doesn’t have end points. It is much looser, it is much more open to interpretation, although I have given very specific loose, very specific locations, like the Carnegie Hall in New York, or Central Station in Antwerp, and all of these places have a very specific meaning.

SF They are all very famous places as well, aren’t they?

EC Exactly. But I am not really offering any solutions or any way of reading into the piece, which might differ slightly.

SF As well as this theme of constant journeys, there is also this juxtaposition of different cultures. Is that an important theme through your work?

EC The way “Adrift” evolved, I had a very specific idea and then the idea evolved into something else. I was looking at filming around the ocean at Newport in Rhode Island. It is a drive through this Estate which was built in the late 19th Century by one of the big manufacturers, the Van Der Biltjs, and the people who established the economics of migrant life at the time and all the architecture actually mirrors European ideas from 17th Century, where you have castles that look like they are from the 17th Century, but in effect they were all built like in the 19th early 20th Century. And it’s more of an idea about culture as such, but it does talk about how migration helped to build nations and establish culture and artefacts.

SF There is also a relationship between new and old, ancient and modern that runs concurrently through these. Is that a conscious decision?

EC Yes. This is something else actually. I always try to give an element within the work which links to a form of art which has a kind of classicism, whether its a sound, whether it is a musical piece, or a visual piece, and there are very little clues within the works. For me it’s a way of grounding, of communicating new ideas to old ideas within a visual image bank.

SF The third part of this exhibition is a two screen video piece being shown in the Project Room called “Dissonant Rhythms”. It is an earlier piece made about two years ago. Would you like to tell us a bit about that?

EC The way the work is edited, the way you experience it is very similar to the others. For me, one of the reasons I am working with multiple screen or video installations, this kind of dimensional imagery, is to do with the idea of you experiencing, of being into the place, of being there and feeling what I felt – what I would like somebody to feel - about that place. And “Dissonant Rhythms” is very much about a place, but then again has connotations to historical facts. It features two main - I wouldn’t say buildings, but structures. One of them is called Fort Van Ertbrand and it’s a Military Headquarters from the First World War. It’s in Belgium near the Dutch border on the outskirts of Antwerp, and the second structure is a sort of anti-tank trap or type of bunker. And what the piece shows, the piece contrasts the beautiful nature around these places and the actual memory embedded within the piece, and the way it has been edited and the use of the very specific soundtrack is about creating a sense of rhythm which reflects a very particular notion in this particular piece. It is about the war, so I was trying to get the sense of what is the rhythm of war, what is the sound of it without actually showing the war. So I was looking at the remnants more as haunting images, haunting structures from our past which are still there, still intact.

SF One of the two sites in this piece is from the First World War, which is beyond the memory of most people living, and yet it works as if it is dealing with the idea of memory. Is that something which runs through all of your work?

EC Very much so yes. It is very much about memory because this is the way I would start off an idea. I would look at my – what I talk about is a larger memory, a national memory, a personal memory, but I will always refer back to… for me it is quite important because I have to have a personal relationship to the piece. I don’t say necessarily that you have to have lived through these events, but there are some links which kind of go back further, or they relate – they trigger different kind of memories.

SF I would like to focus a little on the lyrical side of your work. It is often described as elegiac and mesmerizing, compelling and it clearly is the overwhelming feeling of someone looking at this work. You often film at night, which has a disorientating effect to some extent and contributes very much to feeding the imagination and creating this more lyrical aspect of your work. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

EC What the night does for me is that it just creates a focus onto the very particular subject matter that I am filming or interested in at the time. And as I said I always like the theatricalities in real life. It links to my earlier video works where I would try to extract an event or something which happens in real life, but it has theatrical elements within it. It almost looks as if it has been acted. And it is also to do with lighting. I think the light at night is very focused. It's focused exactly on a subject or the object and partially I think that it would have some relationship with my early practice within painting and drawing, where we talk about the more classical painting and drawing - you would be actually very conscious of light, and you will be thinking about Caravaggio and Rembrandt and Zurbarán, where the lighting is very important.

SF The other aspect of all of this is the soundtrack. In all of your work I find the soundtracks fascinating because they look as if they are the sound of what you are looking at, but they rarely are, but they are kind of a related sound that you got from some other source.

EC It is really linked to what we ask about the lyrical and the poetical in the work, and I think this is a sound that emphasises the poeticism within the work, within the image. It’s not really always just supplementary, it doesn’t reinforce ideas within the work, but has a meaning and of dislocating you. There are different ways of feeling an image and a sound, so the combination of the two, in a way they pull in different directions which really creates another element - creates a void. My idea is to get the viewer to enter that void and to experience it on separate levels.

SF We would of course be fascinated to hear about your early career as a painter and drawer, but your first video work I think was single screen work, and I would be interested to hear how that work emerged initially, and how it developed.

EC That’s interesting because although they are single screen pieces and they are closely related to my previous practice from painting and drawing to photography - I spent quite a few years working with photography. I mean I called them more sort of image making processes in the way you make images and although they were single screen pieces in issue they were issued as a part of a larger body of work, so they could have in fact existed as multiple screen works. But a lot of the ideas behind the single screen works from that particular period were to do with the idea of the street environment. So what I was looking at is boring from real life, from the every-day; really looking at the street environment and depicting moments which would almost feel like I have designed or thought about them, and then try to give them very particular meaning to alter their every-day – extract them from reality, if you like. So a lot of these works are quite short. They are heavily edited.

SF Sometimes they were made from the window of your own observing.

EC Totally. They were very spontaneous. I had a very specific way of looking. I was thinking about ideas of early documentary film-making for example, where Vertov, all the Russian documentary film makers from the turn of the century employed ideas such as the viewer of the subject that in your documentary film, should not be aware of your existence - because they believe that if a subject is aware of your filming, they will start acting. So it is about that idea of acting and non-acting which I mentioned earlier. I kind of wanted people to act without being aware in a way, and then reinforce that through a process of editing, and taking it further through the use of sound in the working dimension as a sort of dislocating sound. So what I would do is film, again in different locations – UK, Europe, Turkey and then I would use a sound from another location which has nothing to do with it. But it’s again, it is to do with creating that feel, that lyrical quality or experience, which is not rational, it doesn’t have to translate immediately into a very specific understanding about culture or where does it come from. All it does relate to is mostly the Western way of seeing things and culture. So a lot of these pieces were filmed at night, really creating a very narrow focus on what’s happening on the event, and even on some of them I wouldn’t use sound at all because I just wanted the image of what’s happening – sometimes the action is much more important and doesn’t need the sound. It was a way or furthering my understanding of classical painting and things like this, with classical ways of making images. So when I film something like this, I would think about this particular scene in relation to a Zurbarán painting I like, or a Caravaggio. As I said, it’s really from very much the everyday. In the ideal world this film is also filmed with hand held camera. Very consciously I was thinking about that. I wanted the viewer to experience the idea that there is something behind – somebody behind the camera, so that – some of them appear to be filmed from a CCTV camera point of view.

SF So it goes back to surveillance again.

EC It goes back to surveillance, exactly! They are linked really. But the difference is that it was hand-held so you feel that there is somebody behind the camera looking at out.

SF So what made you first think about multi-screen, and what was the purpose behind making multi-screen installations?

EC I spent years working within an architectural environment and I studied mural paintings. I was working within an large scale, architectural spaces, and the idea of you experiencing an image within a place, within a space was always present in my work, and I think what the multiple screen provided for me was I could actually create this place, these kind of liminal places or spaces within a place. This is one way of looking at it. The other way was also of – the way you might talk about how cinema and film making develops. I was thinking about linear narrative structures and how they were represented in film. Effectively what I was trying to do was totally against it because a lot of the very prominent film makers would say that multiple screen film or presenting of a film is a formula for chaos, you cannot hold a linear story, and often the idea was that if you work with a film, with a linear single screen film, and if you restructure it, it often kind of falls apart. And I think, it is not just myself, but a lot of artists, a lot of film makers or video artists would work with these parts which were taken out of context and try to make new sense of it.

SF So what about the audience, how do they begin to address this?

EC The idea of creating these multiple screen pieces, this environment, if you like, is to do with experience. It is more for the viewer to experience it rather than understand it. It’s not about offering a solution or a linear story which they can follow.

SF So it’s not a linear story but there is an overwhelming sense of narrative about it. Could you tell us how that operates?

EC It is not a story, there is a narrative, absolutely, that’s true. There is a beginning and end as such, because I often have works which I start at night and then the day arrives, and by the end – it is similar to a trip actually; the piece is started at night and then slowly moves into the twilight, and then you have the day. I still like this, what is to do with a very kind of physical ways of doing it like the day and night or true beginning and end; there is a sense of narrative. I am talking just the end points of the narrative, you know. The middle part is actually different for every single viewer, as it is for me. Every time I look at the piece it will actually give me a different way -

SF So each individual person is making different juxtapositions of images?

EC Exactly. Or you would look at two different images at a given moment if it is a multiple screen piece. So you will rarely have a single point of view where you would experience everything at once. It is almost impossible if you work with many screens. So all this starts very early on when I start thinking about the way I would juxtaposition images, and then through editing process; I am very aware of that, how people read at a particular given moment, rather than forcing a particular linear narrative. I would look at these images and how they would imprint very particular ideas.

SF Well these are all very beautiful works, and you have given a very insightful explanation of them, thank you very much.