Eszter Salamon 1949 — Satellite 7 : une proposition de Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 14 → November 9, 2014

Combining performance, documentary work and self-fiction, Eszter Salamon offers multiple perspectives on the fragile and permeable construction of identity. By developing doubles of herself, she both rethinks the medium and the material, the unique body and the speech that serves to circumscribe it. A body, my body — a vacant space, an unknown territory given individual identity by a name, a jumble of memories, facts, sensations. How can these multiple strata be captured ? How can we draw up a map that enables us to appropriate them ?

For the solo work Mélodrame, she conducted a series of interviews with one of her homonyms she had met in Hungary. In Eszter Salamon 1949, she proposed an expanded version, this time situated in the precise space and time of the exhibition. For four weeks and for six hours every day, the Jeu de Paume will resound to the voice and echoes of this diffracted, amplified life, identity within identity. Reciting the words exchanged between one Eszter Salamon and another, actresses will embody these subjective snippets — where a chance name comes up against historic events and anecdotes.

How can biographical material occupy and subvert a place of conservation ? What kind of mirror do these figures, with their uncertain status, hold up to us ? Capturing the discrepancy between a body and speech, shifting the relationships of identification, Eszter Salamon 1949 introduces confusion into the very nature of “me” and the empathy felt when it is on display. An act of transformation, starting out from the tiniest fragment of personal experience, turning it into “an anonymous and infinite fragment, a becoming that is always contemporary” (Gilles Deleuze).

Eszter Salamon 1949, Récit performé — environ 2 h 10 min, 2014 Courtesy of the artist & Jeu de Paume, Concorde, Paris — Photo © Romain Darnaud.

Eszter Salamon

Eszter Salamon lives in Berlin and Paris.

Eszter Salamon is a choreographer and performer. Since 2001, she has been creating solo works and group works. Her works are presented throughout the world on a regular basis and she is frequently invited to perform in museums. Eszter Salamon’s work revolves around choreography, which she uses as a way of navigating between different media : video, sound, music, text, voice, movement and bodily actions.

In her first works, the activation of the cognitive experience calls into question visual perception, sensation and kinesthesia. Since 2005, her interest in documentary and female autobiography has given rise to a multitude of formats, such as a dance lecture, a video choreography and a monodrama. Her exploration of speculation and fiction gave rise to Tales of the bodiless, a futurist opera without a performer, which imagined the possible modes of existence after the disappearance of humans. Recently, Eszter Salamon has started work on a series of pieces exploring both the notion of monument and the practice of a rewriting of history.