Museumnacht — Horror: Made in Turkey
Museumnacht at W139 features a moderated talk between artists EMIRHAKIN and Elif Satanaya Özbay, delving deep into the realm of Turkish horror movies, focusing particularly on its notable transformation over the past two decades — a shift from aspiring to meet Hollywood standards to a distinct emphasis on Quranic symbolism.
The night will close with a DJ set by SIGA.
Tickets will be available via the Museumnacht website.
Elif Satanaya Özbay is an Amsterdam-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans performances, installations, and essays. With a background in film, she draws from her Turkish-Circassian heritage and horror cinema to investigate narrative construction through montage, collage, and scenographic interventions. Özbay’s work reconfigures personal history, folklore, and pop culture, blending the familiar with the uncanny to explore the role of the unreliable narrator. Her layered, immersive works challenge conventional storytelling, creating speculative spaces that question cultural and historical narratives. Through this, she navigates the intersections of memory, myth, and materiality, crafting new meanings from recontextualized objects and stories.
EMIRHAKIN poses urgent yet open questions about the influence of contemporary politics on our human psyche. Navigating through the ever-changing signs and symbols of our times, the artist is mainly curious about the things that are being put in places that they are not supposed to be, serving as reminders that meaning often emerges through this arbitrariness. His practice encompasses the mediums of performance, text, video, and installation, which are translated into visual (and non-visual) indexes. By challenging the bodily experience of the artist and the audience, his long-durational pieces dismantle the predefined ways of observing and performing, consider the space beyond physicality as a negotiation, and resist the constructed idea of time through the modes of queer temporalities.
SIGA will take us on a worldwide journey through the night, where he will stimulate feelings of celebration and grieve at the same time. Expect to stare and browse into your own soul, or maybe Shazam some tunes every now and then. One thing is for sure, you’ll at least have a little dance before the end of the night, because if we don’t dance for our triumphs, who will? Genres: Ambient, Fourth World, Psychedelic Turkish Jazz, Arabic stuff, Teenage Rage, TikTok hits, and more.
