“The Knight” who sets off for a shady meeting in the forest. He is ambushed and hanged by his feet. A passing stranger, “The Water Bearing Maiden”, saves him. He makes love to her, but the ungrateful Knight hastily leaves the maiden, and rushes off in pursuit of his lost fortune. Instead he loses himself in the forest before finally arriving at the Castle. The second story is that of “The Alchemist”. One day he is visited by the devil who offers him the secret he has been longing for. Guards block entrance to the city of gold. The Maiden and her 6-year old son from the fleeting encounter with the Knight, challenge the guards to enter the city. At the Knight’s wedding reception, the boy appears carrying a sword. A struggle ensues that will leave the Knight bleeding and possibly dead. The boy makes his way and he soon enters the Castle, speechless, disoriented, searching to understand his own destiny as so many others have done before him.” (Çavuşoğlu, 2016)
Çavuşoğlu mixes history and contemporaneity, art and literature “interpreting scenes that happen across time and place in an absurd harmony.”(Çavuşoğlu, 2016) He employs a creative process based on rational examination of literary sources, but in the course of study and analysis Çavuşoğlu creates a unique game of intelligent and constantly shifting relationships between the human world and the natural one,
between order and chaos, rationality and instinct, action and destiny, past and future. Each card and each character’s stories are intrinsically entwined, and then interrelated with yet another character reflecting on the fact that we are part of a broader community where all our actions might affect the path of another person.
The film presents a game, a story within a story, and a film within a film that brings us to the search for universal elements, but at the same time displays the limits of this pursuit of perfection. Furthermore it deals directly with a rich tradition of thought that draws on the semiotics, anthropology and philosophy of language analysis and that has reached important milestones with the activities of de Saussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Foucault. Çavuşoğlu does it with the camera, but also liaising with the the wider tradition linked to the image making process itself. On the one hand we have a tendency to challenge the classical image that comes from ancient times to the present day: think of the "golden calf" spoken of in the Bible, the Byzantine and Protestant iconoclasm up to the neo Avant guards and the conceptualism. On the other hand, a really contemporary trend to reconsider the image (think of Debord – the society of the Spectacle, or Baudrillard and Perniola and the society of simulacra) as the conceptualism gives way to images because they are able to combine speed of contemporaneity (the fact that we always have
Desire Lines (Tarot & Chess) 2016, Single channel HD (2048 x 853) video, audio. Duration: 29:11 min. Video Still. © Ergin Çavuşoğlu Courtesy the artist, Extra City Kunsthal, Platform 0090, FLACC, SAHA and Rampa, Istanbul