This is a silent party. Many guests have come here to celebrate the spring equinox. Spirits and things are freely circulating in the space. This is how it feels when entering Özlem Altin’s exhibition “Cathartic ballet” at CIRCUS. All is still, a perfect silence, yet something is happening. At the entrance, the first “guest” you meet is Untitled (Mädchen im Baum) (2013), two black-and-white photographs of the body of a woman entangled between the branches of a big tree. Her legs clasped around the trunk, the head bent over, the torso stretched out as if in a gymnastic exercise. The images capture the figure from two different angles, two reverse perspectives: front and back. Rest and exhaustion. Comforting and disturbing. In this unnatural pose, hooked onto a tree, the figure looks like an abandoned object, her body torn like that of a broken doll. A doll on a tree like a body as a thing amongst things. It produces a sense of estrangement-empathy. Altin has transformed the neutral space of the gallery into a place crawling with doll-like humans, human-like gestures, objects-like-poses, and bodies-like-rhythms that respond to each other and perform in synch to set the whole space in motion. Everybody is …