Adaptation – Cinefication

Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s Adaptation – Cinefication is made up of two distinct elements. The exhibition examines the artist’s engagement in the past with painting in its classical and contemporary guises, and juxtaposes them with his better-known film installation works. Çavuşoğlu thus retraces recurring preoccupations in his practice, showing older work in a new context.
The wider concept refers directly to the ‘The Soviet project of “cinefication” that represents the most grandiose scheme of film distribution, exhibition, and reception that the world has known to date.’, as described by Thomas Lahusen. Çavuşoğlu borrows this framework to comment on the current globalised system of ‘cinefication’ of the arts.
Architecturally the gallery is divided in two mirrored spaces on street level. The Adaptation component is presented in one fully front glazed room with a series of paintings from the 1990s, most prominently the Instant (1998) series. In the opposite darkened space Cinefication takes on the form of a film screening. In a theatre-like space, furnished with rows of cinema chairs, Çavuşoğlu shows a number of new pieces such as Résurrection des Mannequins (2014), as well as elements from his recent repertoire of video works, for instance And I Awoke (2012). Alongside the paintings Çavuşoğlu exhibits several small-scale readymade and ‘naturemade’ sculptures. Çavuşoğlu intends his works to be read like chapters in a literary text.