Eszter Salamon is an artist, choreographer, and performer, she is a PhD fellow in artistic research at KHiO, Oslo. Her works include performances, lecture performances, performative installations, sound installations, and films, in search of new visual, narrative, sonic, and bodily configurations. Between fiction and documentary, her artistic practice is inscribed in speculative and multidisciplinary practices with strong focus on intergenerational, transnational, and feminist relationalities. She often develops her works in close collaboration with performers, composers, dramaturges, film artists, non-professional practitioners, and her family members. Since 2014, she has been engaged in developing a series of works called the ‘monument series’.
Since 2021, she has created solos and larger scale works that have been presented in performing arts venues and museums internationally, including Centre Pompidou Paris (FR), Centre Pompidou Metz (FR), Festival d’Automne (FR), Avignon Festival (FR), RuhrTriennale (DE), Holland Festival (NL), Oslo Opera House (NO), BIT Teatergarasjen Bergen (NO), The Kitchen New York (USA), The Place London (UK), HAU Hebbel-am-Ufer Berlin (DE), Berlin Documentary Forum (DE), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (BE), Kaaitheater (BE), Tanzquartier Wien (AT), Winer Festwochen (AT), Steirischer Herbst Graz (AT), Manchester International Festival (UK), FTA Montreal (CA), Dance Triennale Tokyo (JP), TheatreWorks Singapore (SG), Opéra de Lille (FR), Onassis Cultural Center, Athens (GR), Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (PT), Romaeuropa Festival - Teatro Palladium, Rome (IT) among others.
She is frequently invited to present her performances, performative installations, and films in museums, including MoMA (USA), Museo Reina Sofía (ESP), MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (ESP), Serralves Foundation (PT), Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE), mumok (AT), Fondation Cartier (FR), Villa Empain - Boghossian Foundation (BE), ING Art Center (BE), KINDL (DE). Her exhibition Eszter Salamon 1949 was presented at Jeu de Paume (F) in 2014 as part of Satellite curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. Her performative installation Study for the Valeska Gert Pavilion was presented at the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art 2022. Her sound installation Love Letters to Valeska Gert has been commissioned and presented in the frame of the group exhibition Art-Music-Dance at Museum der Modern Salzburg in 2016.
She received the Hedda Award (Heddaprisen) in 2023 in the category of Best Scenography and Costume for costume design for the performance MONUMENT 0.10: The Living Monument, created with 14 performers in collaboration with the Norwegian National Dance Company - Carte Blanche in 2022, in Bergen. She is the laureate of the Evens Art Prize 2019 and winner of La vie bonne call for projects by the National Center for Plastic Arts (FR) and Aware: Archive of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, in 2020.
Sommerspiele (Summer Games)
Sommerspiele is the second film of the ‘Reappearances series’ I developed during the three years of my PhD fellowship. This series relates to a new practice of ‘performing for the camera and for an audience to come’ as a form of artistic displacement from performance to film. The films are re-articulations, extensions and continuations of already existing performative works of my artistic archive. They are occasions for deepening my speculative history writing practice and for working around notions of critical and alternative narratives in relationship to memory, and the archive. They are also frames in which I research practices of dissemination of knowledge and where I can introduce a new modality to the power relation traditionally performed by the camera and the moving body.
Set in several spaces which were built to host the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Sommerspiele creates connections between the past and present, performance and film, body and architecture, movement and camera. The film examines the presence and absence of bodies in public spaces and the function of historical places within the current social and political imagination. Its cinematic composition is built upon historical facts, personal memories, and fiction.
With references to the German Avant Garde artist Valeska Gert’s (Gertrud Valesca Samosch, 1892-1978) work and life, the film confronts the historical context of the Nazi Summer Olympic Games. The historical traces of the site carry memories of the numerous relationships that architects and artists had with the National Socialist regime while others, including Gert herself, were considered makers of 'Degenerate Art’.
Sommerspiele addresses the politics of remembering and forgetting. It faces the failures of collective memory in the form of a poetic resistance to the cinematographic, choreographic, sculptural, and architectural representations of Nazi propaganda. While doing so, the film emphasizes ‘the grotesque’ that Valeska Gert used as an artistic weapon and through its narrative, it destabilized our memory of the images of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games.
My presentations will include a short introduction to my project and the way it has been reshaped and developed during my fellowship and the consequences of these changes. I will show some sequences of the films and analyze them and their intricate relationality to Gert’s performances and writings and to the historical contexts in which she lived and worked. I will introduce historical, artistic, and literary (autobiographical) references on which the films build themselves. I also intend to present the concept of ‘transhistorical body’ that I developed as an alternative to the practices of re-enactment in performance, and share reflections on ‘reappearance’ (in terms of temporality, geography, and media). I plan to give insight to the aesthetic challenges I faced by creating the film series and talk about the experience of writing my explicit reflection on it.
Reappearance
Reappearance is the first film of the ‘Reappearances series’ I developed during the three years of my PhD fellowship. This series relates to a new practice of ‘performing for the camera and for an audience to come’ as a form of artistic displacement from performance to film. The films are re-articulations, extensions and continuations of already existing performative works of my artistic archive. They are occasions for deepening my speculative history writing practice and for working around critical and alternative narratives in relationship to memory and the archive. They are methods for my research on choreograpohy’s capabilities for dissemination of knowledge and through which I can introduce a new modality into the power relations traditionally performed by the camera and the moving body.
Reappearance is a cinematic speculation on history and memory. The film is based on two anecdotes recounted by Valeska Gert in her autobiographical book, Ich bin eine Hexe: in one, she dances naked for her lover, a pianist, in exchange for the pieces he composed for her. In the other, set in London in 1936, she tries her hand at writing a film script. Over the course of three weeks, she dictated her ideas to a man until she realized he was a drug addict and his transcripts were illegible. Reappearance is structured around this loss and Gert’s explorations of different media: dance, theater, cabaret, and film. At its heart are the issues of female subjectivity and the materiality of the female body, as well as Valeska Gert’s use of the grotesque.
In the empty spaces of a museum, a female figure wanders about, naked. She bears a strong resemblance with German avant-garde artist Valeska Gert (Gertrud Valesca Samosch, 1892-1978). All at once intruder, agitator and entertainer, she plays with the museum’s empty architecture, occupies the cinematic space, uses the camera as a tool for emancipation. Juggling with surveillance and the desire to be seen, she transforms invisibility into presence as her body and voice inhabit historical traces, autobiographical memories, and fiction.
The film reflects on the physical and artistic impermanence of performance and the moving image’s potentiality in constituting a space for altering the historical canon, and for creating a ‘tunnel to the future’; a trans-historical space of artistic and political dimensions. A cinematic manifesto against oblivion, Reappearance celebrates the genealogy that connects female artists from different periods by composing a trans-historical body, a sort of hybridisation formed by the visions and gestures of several artists.
My presentations will include a short introduction to my project and the way it has been reshaped and developed during my fellowship and the consequences of these changes. I will show some sequences of the films and analyze them and their intricate relationality to Gert’s performances and writings and to the historical contexts in which she lived and worked. I will introduce historical, artistic, and literary (autobiographical) references on which the films build themselves. I also intend to present the concept of ‘transhistorical body’ that I developed as an alternative to the practices of re-enactment in performance, and share reflections on ‘reappearance’ (in terms of temporality, geography, and media). I plan to give insight to the aesthetic challenges and ethical concerns I faced by creating the film series and talk about the experience of writing my explicit reflection on it.ced by creating the film series and talk about the experience of writing my explicit reflection on it.