Ergin Çavuşoğlu was born in 1968 in Targovishte, Bulgaria. He received his BFA from Marmara University, Istanbul, in 1994, his MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1995, and his Ph.D. from the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom, in 2009. Çavuşoğlu works in installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video, but exceeds the boundaries of each to question the conceptual underpinnings of image making itself. Instant (1998) illuminates some of Çavuşoğlu’s central concerns. In this series of five small paintings, the rectangular format of which mimics that of a Polaroid Land Camera print, the artist represents the banal spaces of contemporary life in the style of snapshot photography. In Instant I, for example, he depicts the cabin of a commercial airliner, capturing the repetitive forms of the overhead storage bins and monitors from the viewpoint of a seated passenger. Yet the ostensible casualness of the work’s composition and subject is betrayed by the precision of Çavuşoğlu’s realist style and his emphasis on the painting’s status as image. The artist has introduced a complex layering of frames—the physical edge of the painting itself, the frame of the simulated Polaroid print, and the frames’ of the suspended monitors—to insist that his mundane snapshot is, in fact, a highly mediated construction. Instant I thus offers a pointed criticism of globalized culture, through which the world has been transformed into a homogenous image of itself. The multiple framing devices that characterize such early paintings find their full expression in Çavuşoğlu’s multiscreen video installations. Point of Departure (2006), a six-screen projection set in English and Turkish airports (which the artist considers “the end points of the European idea”) is structured around the chance meeting of a Turkish researcher and an English journalist. But while the work constructs a romantic narrative of physical and cultural crossings between East and West, its primary subject is the non-place of the airports themselves, which Çavuşoğlu represents from a range of perspectives—close-ups, aerial views, and the x-rayed contents of luggage—in order to capture the fragmentary quality of contemporary life. Çavuşoğlu has had solo exhibitions at the John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton (2006); Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2008); Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2009); PEER, London (2010); and YARAT Contemporary Art Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan (2015). He has been included in the group exhibitions All Inclusive—A Tourist World, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2008); Home/s, Benaki Museum, Athens (2013); and Artists in Their Time, Istanbul Modern Sanat Müzesi (2015). He also participated in the Canakkale Biennial, Canakkale, Turkey (2014); Kiev Biennial: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art (2012); Manifesta, Murcia, Spain (2010); and Mediterranean Biennial, Haifa, Israel (2010). Çavuşoğlu lives and works in London.