Circassian beauty. Performance by Elif Özbay

In her performance Elif Satanaya Özbay examines the construction of the “Circassian Beauty,” a 19th-century spectacle popularized in P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions. Marketed as exotic refugees, these staged women embodied fantasies of purity, captivity, and otherness. Accompanied by live accordion, the performance unfolds as both lecture and incantation. 

Rather than re-enacting the role of a “Circassian beauty”, Özbay critically deconstructs the narratives that shaped their image and enduring legacy. Historical travelogues, orientalist paintings, gothic literature, and fragments of oral history are recited and reframed, citation itself becoming a form of embodiment. Folklore intersects with vampiric figures, Snow White’s death-like sleep, and embalmed bodies displayed in glass coffins, revealing how beauty is preserved, distorted, and consumed. Positioning herself as both researcher and performer, Özbay stages the unstable life of stories: how they persist across centuries, who is authorized to narrate them, and the forms of violence and desire they continue to carry.

 

Curators: Michalina Sablik and Vera Zalutskaya