Which Sun Gazed Down on Your Last Dream?

Which sun gazed down on your last dream?*: A question that Charles Baudelaire asks in his On Wine and Hashish, a seminal work on the effervescence of intoxication, its ability to render a person outside of time, memory, and place. It is an inherently surreal question too, and one perhaps that only the “intoxicated” can poetically and surreptitiously ask; it is also a question that asks “where,” but of a “where” that is placeless, nationless, outside of borders, a “where” which is almost spiritual.

Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s third solo exhibition at RAMPA, Which sun gazed down on your last dream?, (March 10 to May 7), is in fact akin to variants of this question, and to a kind of metaphoric inebriation from wondering and wandering subliminally about and in the trivialities of the world, stuck in an in-between, a liminal space. Çavuşoğlu has an engendered interest in the idea of travel, or movement and migration—not just of people, but of things, objects, ideas. In this he finds the space or place, the surrealities that most interest him. But, it is not the imbedded meaning of the thing that he finds most fruitful. This Duchampian ideology runs throughout this multifaceted exhibition, (which includes video, sculpture, painting, and photography), as well as his oeuvre. Spaces of temporality or placeless spaces are precisely the point for Çavuşoğlu. In an in-between space room is left for possibilities, for thought. Indeed, finding the beautiful in anything is a spiritual awakening of sorts, and seeing the beautiful in everyday things is the kind of Dadaist hymnal that Çavuşoğlu’s works ask us to revel in.

*This quote is paraphrased from the original text by Baudelaire which reads: “Which sun gazed down on his last dream?.”