Eszter Salamon

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, the actresses Véronique Alain, Désirée Olmi et Frédérique Pierson, 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).

CURATOR
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, independent curator

ACTRESSES
Véronique Alain, Désirée Olmi, Frédérique Pierson

PARTNERS
The Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques contributes to the production of works
in the Satellite program.

The exhibition is co-produced by the Jeu de Paume and the Festival d’Automne, as part of the outside
programmation of the FIAC.
It was realized with the help of the Goethe Institute (Paris), The Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris)
and the Centre National de la Danse (Pantin Île-de-France).

The Jeu de Paume is a member of the Tram and d.c.a networks, association française de développement des centres d’art.

MEDIA PARTNERS
art press, ParisArt, Souvenirs from earth TV, Radio Nova