02 Jun Elif Satanaya Özbay
Residency Program October 2022
Satanaya explores collective memory about epic love stories, locking fates, locks of hair, blood lockets, forever to be in love, eternal, immortal, the artist knots stories and images from contemporary media to portray a symbolised meaning behind the mechanical device.
Starting from a mythological Circassian tale called Nart Sane, contemporary love stories are ‘knotted’ into each other to expand and rebuild this cliche trope. By using a mind map-like structure, the work expands on itself and questions the hegemonic romantic vision 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 these stories somehow resemble each other, often with minor similarities, but always with the same intent; to love or be loved for eternity.
The use of hair in Elif´s work appears because of the parallelism between its braiding and the interweaving of stories and references that she builds. Behaving like a weed, wild and alive, a parasite that slowly covers everything, being loyal to the form while extracting the life to its end of what it coats.
The message is repeated, from a sacrifice ruins emerge, and their laments become idyllic sites of promises.
Supported by Media Art Festival Leeuwarden by winning the jury prize for the video installation Boxer, Ring, Cycle in 2021.
