Eszter Salamon

Through a mixture of performance, documentary work and auto-fiction, Eszter Salamon multiplies perspectives on the fragile and permeable construction of identity. The versions of herself and the doubles that she shapes, together lead to a rethinking of medium and matter, the individual body and the word which serves to delimit it. We are dealing with a body, my body - this unkempt land, and great unknown singled out by a name, a mishmash of memories, facts and sensations. How can we come to terms with its multiple strata, map out a picture of it, and thereby appropriate it?

For the Mélodrame solo piece, the artist carried out a series of interviews with one of her homonyms that she met in Hungary. With Eszter Salomon 1949, the artist offers us an expanded version of it, by taking over the space and specific time of the exhibition itself. During four weeks, six hours per day, Jeu de Paume will resonate with voices and echoes from this diffracted life that has been amplified and staged. Returning to the words of these exchanges between one Eszter Salamon and another, actresses will then embody these subjective snatches of dialogue - during which a chance encounter develops between a name and past events or anecdotes. How can biographical matter fill and subvert a place dedicated to conservation? In what way do these figures of undecided status mirror us? Through registering the gap between a body and a word, and shifting the relationships of identification, Eszter Salomon 1949 throws doubt on the very nature of “me”, and the empathy that its putting on show generates. The result is a transformation operation, that uses as its base our existence at its most insignificant, and from it makes “an anonymous and infinite fragment, a becoming that is always contemporary”. (Gilles Deleuze)