Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s short video work One Hundred Thousand Balls, 2013, comments on a contextual aspect of Marcel Duchamp’s work Monte Carlo Bond. The latter are eight bonds that Duchamp issued in 1924 (even though the artist had intended to originally issue 30). They were meant to raise money to fund Duchamp’s system of playing - and winning at - roulette, which he was testing in Monte Carlo the same year.

One Hundred Thousand Balls reflects directly on the “Company Statutes” that Duchamp printed on the reverse of each bond, and which he used to legitimise the bonds and the associated monetary transaction. The idea was to exploit an inherent weakness within the roulette system through a process that was “experimentally based on one hundred thousand throws of the ball.”

Çavuşoğlu’s One Hundred Thousand Balls offers an alternative “cumulative system” of chance.

Ergin Çavuşoğlu lives and works in London.