I looked in at the Arnolfini today at part of the British Art show that’s there just now, and spent a few minutes looking at Ergin Cavusoglu’s [apologies for lack of accents] film work Tahtakale, which seems to show men trading currency somewhere (Turkey?) on several screens whilst on others porters queue up near trucks to take goods into market. The currency traders are frantic, electronic, though still ad-hoc in every way: the market is just a street, the communications depend on bunches of mobile phones clad in a fist, sometimes bristling with unknown wires. Trading and conversation is boisterous, continuous, full of a sense of sharp practice, backed up by the scrolling screen of  transcribed sound bites that accompanies the films.

In contrast, the porters do something similar, but move the real rather than the abstract around, and where the currency traders are constantly, frenetically pushing information and rights to and fro, using language, the porters spend nearly all the time in the film waiting to collect another piece of merchandise to slowly move from one point to another: water, chemicals, boxes of goods. There seems to be a contrast between real and abstract commodities, between patience and impatience as twin virtues, stolidity and aggressiveness (at least in trading terms). The transcription of the currency trading scrolls very very slowly, partly, perhaps, to aid reading between it and the movies. One can look away and catch up. Partly it seems to be an exercise in patience itself, backed with powerul sound. The sound is some sort of Eastern-sounding liturgical-type music, but it certainly conjures a sense of tradition, of awesome history, etc. Also a sense of relating to a different sense of time, one that is based more on spiritual practice. One wonders how the time of history, the time of trading, spiritual time and work time relate to one another. Perhaps the artist wants us to consider how the present is composed of many different experiences of meaning, of transporting meaning over time, of meaning in place too. How long has trading like this happened here? Has it always seemed like this? Always as ad-hoc and insubstantial? Or does the substance of it lie somewhere other than appearances?