Public defence: Eszter Salamon

My doctoral research centres on two overarching questions. How can choreography and performance function as modes of displacing and disseminating knowledge? What alternative forms of knowledge production emerge when artistic archives are reopened from a critical, feminist, and speculative standpoint, rather than being reconstructed and re-enacted?

The notion of displacement runs through my research as a structural and poetic principle. I use it alongside transposition and transfer to examine the multiple ways artistic practice, knowledge, and bodies move across media, geographies, time, and relational contexts. This frame lets me explore how praxis materialises over time through the maturation and generative transformation of ideas, manifesting across different areas and forms, as well as through seriality. Dissemination is the second structural concern running through my research project. Dissemination asks with whom, for whom, and under what conditions artistic knowledge is shared; it encompasses the participatory and choreographic practices through which knowledge is produced collectively. In this framework, dissemination is not the endpoint of the research but a method, a way of sharing power through artistic practice.

My artistic results emerged from reflection and practice, as well as from public performances, screenings and exhibitions. The Reappearances Film Series and the choreographic duets of Mothers & Daughters (2024) are linked by their relationship to my artistic archive from which they originate and by the processes of transformation initiated by their respective structural, formal, and embodied paradigms. Taken together, these films and performances form lines of inquiry that are somewhat independent yet largely related. Each operates through a distinct yet related methodology: ‘speculative history-making’ and ‘performing for the camera’ in the films Reappearance (2022 ) and Sommerspiele (2023); ‘choreographic practice of mutual body-to-body care’, intergenerational ‘co-learning’, and somatic practice in Mothers & Daughters. Through them, I engage with artistic, social and political themes to deepen my understanding of their impact from feminist, transnational, and transgenerational perspectives.

My research explored the relationships between the body, performance, and film, and between history, archives, and memory. By extending the intensities and intentions of the past from a present perspective, and by taking on the roles of performer and director, I came to understand how cinema could do more than connect the historical past with the present. Acting as a ‘tunnel to the future’, it also opened up space and time in which the body, camera, and the editing of sound and images forge an artistic mode of documentation in the form of fiction: an alternative to the habitual modes of re-enactment and reconstruction of performance. Similarly, investigating intergenerational choreographic practices involving intimacy and touch between mothers and daughters has led me to examine alternative ways of transmitting and producing knowledge that challenge the tradition of repertory and the reproducibility of performance via replaceable bodies.

Eszter Salamon is an artist based in Berlin and Paris. Since 2001, she has developed her work as a choreographer and performer and has pursued an interdisciplinary practice through long-term research and collaboration within the fields of performance and the visual arts. Her work engages with speculative and feminist approaches to history-making. The performative exhibition Eszter Salamon 1949 (2014), commissioned by the Jeu de Paume in Paris as part of the Satellite series, draws on female autobiography and explores the overlap between documentary and fiction. The Monument series, which began in 2014, comprises several works that foster relationships with marginalised poetics and artistic figures from the past. In 2016, she began researching Valeska Gert, a German dancer and artist of the historical avant-garde, which led to the Valeska Gert Monuments, a series of sound installations and performances the artist initiated and developed in collaboration with choreographer and performer Boglárka Börcsök. These works include Love Letters to Valeska Gert (2016), presented at Museum der Moderne Salzburg as part of a group exhibition; the Valeska Gert Museum (2017), which premiered at Villa Empain in Brussels; and the Valeska Gert Monument(2017), which premiered at Pact Zollverein in Essen. Her films Reappearance (2022) and Sommerspiele (2023) explore her practice of performing for the camera. First screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, they were presented internationally, including at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. In 2022, she created Study for the Valeska Gert Pavilion, a performative installation developed with students from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse in Lyon. This experiment in artistic practice within an art-education framework was presented at the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art for several months in 2022. In her 2019 museum performance M/OTHERS, she explored themes of intergenerationality and ageing alongside her mother, Erzsébet Gyarmati. In 2024, she collaborated with the Oslo-based performers Sulekha Ali Omar, Safia Abdi Haase, Chryz Nypan, and Drude Haga to create Mothers & Daughters (2024), presented at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Bozar in Brussels, and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. Her film installation Landscaping blends performance, natural environments, music, and cinema. Filmed near Bergen, it was created in collaboration with Carte Blanche and composer Carmen Villain. This work builds on the large-scale stage performance The Living Monument (2022), for which the artist won the 2023 Hedda Prize for Costume Design. Landscaping premiered at the 2025 Biennale de la Danse in Lyon and was presented as part of the Centre Pompidou's Constellation programme at IRCAM in Paris and at KODE in Bergen as part of Festspillene 2026.