26 May Elif Satanaya Özbay
Programa de Residencias Octubre 2022
Elif Santanaya is currently working on a series of connections that start from the custom of locking a padlock as a symbolic gesture, in particular, romantic engagement locks.
Satanaya explores the collective memory about epic love stories, locked destinies, locks of hair, medallions of blood, being in love forever, eternally, immortally, the artist knots stories and images from contemporary media to portray a symbolic meaning behind the mechanical device.
Drawing from a Circassian mythological tale called Nart Sane, contemporary love stories are “braided” together to expand and reconstruct this cliché. Using a mind-map-like structure, the work expands upon itself and questions the hegemonic romantic view of love and its immortality. Romeo and Juliet, Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie, Lady Nart Sana and her beloved, Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly, Dracula and his beloved, Tristan and Isolde. All of these stories somehow resemble each other, often with minor similarities, but always with the same intention; to love or be loved for eternity.
The use of hair in her work appears by the parallelism between its braiding and the intertwining that the artist makes between different stories and references, behaving like a weed, wild and alive, a parasite that covers everything slowly being loyal to the form but extracting life from that which it covers.
The message is repeated, ruins emerge from a sacrifice, and its laments become idyllic places of promise.
Supported by the Media Art Festival Leeuwarden by winning the jury prize for the video installation Boxer, Ring, Cycle in 2021.
