Elif Satanaya Özbay

Biography
Elif Satanaya Özbay is a visual artist based in Amsterdam whose practice spans performance, installation, and text. She treats narrative as unstable—spliced, reframed, or interrupted—interweaving Circassian mythology, horror, and pop culture. Through this lens, she examines transformation, decay, memory, and the transmission of cultural stories, creating works that shift fluidly between the personal and the collective, the mythical and the contemporary.

Their work has recently been presented at Uqbar, Pickle Bar, and the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival (Berlin), at MORPHO (Antwerp), and at SIGN+ (Groningen).

Residency project
During her residency at La Becque, Elif Satanaya Özbay will investigate the image of the “Circassian Beauty,” a fabricated 19th-century spectacle that exoticized and mythologized women as both monstrous and ideal. The project will unfold as a fragmented, immersive sonic narrative, combining experimental scriptwriting, environmental field recordings, and ceramics-based sound installations. In dialogue with Lake Geneva’s historical resonance with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the work will poetically reflect on identity, displacement, and the ongoing commodification of beauty, weaving together history, myth, and the sensory experience of place.