"The performance is conceived as a monument of intergenerational collaboration and a project of creating a study of mothering and daughtering: a specific form of co-living. It’s a monument for rehearsing relationships other than the ones we are expected to practice in a professional and public situation." — Eszter Salamon

Mothers & Daughters is the Norwegian premiere of the latest work in the MONUMENT series by internationally acclaimed choreographer Eszter Salamon. Set in the skylit spaces of Kunstnernes Hus, the piece is a slow choreography - a kind of living sculpture depicting transgenerational relationships that are personal as much as they are collective.

Hug, tender caress, and stern grip are movements associated with the mother-daughter bond. Yet it is not clear if those gestures are innate, observed from familial relationships or absorbed from cultural representations. While an intimacy is considered natural when daughters are children, touch between grown daughters and their mothers is not, as if tabu. The interactions between grown women and their mothers are rather stereotypically characterized by conflict and competition. Countering these assumptions, Mothers & Daughters asks if intimacy can be re-learned, and if transgenerational solidarity can be constructed.

The choreography exclusively presented at Kunstnernes Hus features both trained and untrained performers: dancer and choreographer Sulekha Ali Omar and the awarded rights-activist Safia Abdi Haase; and dancer and choreographer Christine Nypan and dance practitioner and educator Drude Haga. Each mother-daughter pair developed their own mutual choreography with Salamon in which a relationship was both learned and unlearned through movement and touch.

Eszter Salamon is a choreographer, artist-researcher and performer who lives between Berlin, Paris and Budapest. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in artistic research at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. Salamon works at the intersection of documentary and fiction using choreography as an activating and organizing agency between various media such as image, sound, music, text, voice, bodily movement, and actions. She focuses on speculative history-making, transnational, transfeministe, and inter-generational relations. She creates work and conducts research in collaboration with professional and non-professional performers and dancers, dramaturges, musicians, composers, film artists, and friends and family members.

Since 2001, she has created solos and large-scale performances, performative installations, and films that have been presented in performing arts venues and museums worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA, New York City; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Serralves Foundation, Porto; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; mumok, Vienna; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Museo Centro Gaiás, Santiago de Compostela; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg; Villa Empain - Boghossian Foundation, Brussels; ING Art Center, Brussels; and KINDL, Berlin. Her solo exhibition Eszter Salamon 1949 (2014) was presented at Jeu de Paume, Paris, as part of Satellite curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. Her most recent film Sommerspiele (2023) premiered at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in the frame of the exhibition POWER SPACE VIOLENCE. Planning and Building under National Socialism, and it was screened during Hors Pistes 2024 at Centre Pompidou, Paris.