Aslı Çavuşoğlu

Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s research-based practice imbricates the different trajectories humans, and their artifacts travel so as to pattern histories of use and desire through these very exchanges. Her insight lies in an understanding that materiality alone is not enough to interpret how an object, be it a pigment, or a shard of pottery, embodies the worldview of its maker, or receiver. Like light through a prism, artifacts cast vectors which project the personal, and social tales that surround, frame, and even recast them. More than mere anachronisms, Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s interventions within material culture give symbolic from to the often-hidden ways that authoritative descriptions of ancient objects by modern interpreters, for example, change those objects’ very meaning. Records always tell stories, but no story is neutral, nor is it fixed. By blending factual, counter-factual, and alternative readings of diverse media, and acts, together, Çavuşoğlu reveals how information, when exhibited, embodies a grander apparatus, namely, the politics of display, and its inherent power relations.