Public programme (t)#2: Elif Satanaya Özbay

In “Circassian Beauty”, Elif Satanaya Özbay revisits the invention of the "Circassian Beauty," a 19th-century spectacle popularized in P.T. Barnum's freak shows. Marketed as exotic refugees, these staged women embodied fantasies of purity, captivity, and otherness. Özbay does not reenact them but critically unravels the stories that shaped their image and endurance. Accompanied by live accordion, the performance unfolds as both lecture and incantation. Historical travelogues, orientalist paintings, gothic literature, and fragments of oral history are read aloud and reframed—citation itself becoming a form of embodiment. Folklore collides with vampiric figures, Snow White's death-like sleep, and embalmed bodies displayed in glass coffins, exposing how beauty is preserved, distorted, and consumed. Positioning herself as both researcher and performer, Özbay stages the unstable life of stories — how they linger across centuries, who gets to tell them, and what violences or desires they conceal.

Elif Satanaya Özbay is a visual artist based in Amsterdam whose practice spans performances, installations, and performative lectures. She approaches narrative as something volatile— spliced, reframed, or interrupted—using scenography, sculptural objects, and voice to create environments where fiction and reality bleed into one another. Drawing on Circassian mythology, horror tropes, and pop culture, her work examines themes of transformation, decay, memory, and cultural storytelling.

Her work has been presented internationally at The Salon with The Community and NADA (Paris), Pickle Bar and Uqbar (Berlin), Fondazione Giuliani with Lateral Roma (Rome), KASKO (Basel), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Les Bains Douches (Alençon), as well as at LOODS6 and W139 (Amsterdam), and MORPHO (Antwerp), among other places.