STARTUP 3 | Page 6

All these broader ideas about culture, place and historicity culminated and manifested themselves in his latest major film artwork entitled ’Desire Lines /Tarot & Chess/’ (2016) presented last year as a solo project within The Image Generator II exhibition at the Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp. According to the artist ‘Desire Lines /Tarot & Chess/’, “reveals the universal patterns of human behavior and their relationship to past, present and future observed through the prism of literary expressions articulated by Italo Calvino in his book The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973). Calvino’s book portrays an encounter of travelers who tell their adventures using tarot cards instead of words. The interpretations of the cards in the book allude to classic tales such as Faust, Oedipus, and Shakespearian narratives such as Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.” (Çavuşoğlu, 2016)

This comment is an important example of Çavuşoğlu’s approach to the use of literary sources in his artistic practice, which he elaborates further on in his presentation. Çavuşoğlu unfolds this complex project in the following text by saying that “the patterns of