Talk
Final appraisal: Eszter Salamon
Eszter Salamon, PhD candidate in artistic research at the Academy of Dance at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, will screen her Reappearances Film Series at an open public event.
A conversation between Dean Ingrid Cecile B. Hall and Eszter Salamon will follow the screenings. It will contextualise the research on Valeska Gert, which is one element of her PhD project.
The conversation will be conducted in English.
The Reappearances Film Series — comprising the films Reappearance and Sommerspiele — forms part of Eszter Salamon's doctoral research at the Academy of Dance, with a particular focus on the concept of 'performance for the camera’.
The Reappearances Film Series is a cinematic meditation on history, drawing on two anecdotes recounted by German avant-garde artist and dancer Valeska Gert (1892 - 1978) in her autobiographical book Ich bin eine Hexe. Kaleidoskop meines Lebens (1968). In one anecdote, she dances naked for her lover, a pianist, in exchange for the pieces he composed for her. In another, set in London in the summer of 1936, Gert tries her hand at writing a film script. For three weeks, she dictated her ideas to a person until she realised he was a drug addict and that his transcripts were utterly illegible. Imagined around the lost screenplay and in connection with Gert’s explorations of the media of dance, theatre, cabaret, and film, the series revolves around issues of transnational and feminist intersubjectivity and the materiality of the female body.
Films
Reappearance (2022)
37 min. film
In the vast, empty spaces of an art museum, a female figure resembling the avant-garde artist Valeska Gert moves through the space. At once an intruder, an agitator, and an entertainer, she engages with the camera as a medium of self-emancipation. As she embodies historical traces, personal memories, and fictional narratives, she navigates the tensions between surveillance and the desire to be seen, transforming historical invisibility into cinematic presence. Reappearance explores the physical impermanence of performance and the potential of the moving image to alter the historical canon and perhaps even construct a 'tunnel to the future': a space of artistic kinship and political alliance across time.
Sommerspiele (2023)
25:41 min. film
In Sommerspiele (Summer Games), the figure of Valeska Gert is set against the architecture of the 1936 Olympic Summer Games, built under the Nazi regime. While the architectural remnants of the Nazi past are used for entertainment, recreation, and professional sports, other histories—such as Gert’s—are often poorly documented and largely forgotten. Drawing on autobiographical elements, historical facts, and art-historical references, the film suggests that performance and the camera can serve as vehicles for producing new memories that connect past and present. In line with Gert’s legacy and to counter the traces of racist propaganda, Salamon challenges representations of bodies, race, and gender, employing the grotesque, a performative weapon used by Gert.
Both films feature nudity.
Certain images in Sommerspiele may evoke traumatic memories associated with experiences of violence against the body.
Supervisors
Main supervisor: Bojana Cvejić, professor at the Academy of Dance, KHiO
Second supervisor: Sarah Lookofsky, artistic director of Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
Eszter Salamon
https://esztersalamon.net/