Valeska Gert Guest Professorship 2026: Eszter Salamon
8 Jul 2026, 7 pm

The choreographer, artist and performer Eszter Salamon will hold the Valeska Gert Guest Professorship for Dance and Performance during the summer semester of 2026. Salamon uses choreography as an activating and organizing agency between various media such as image, sound, music, text, voice, bodily movement and actions. Her works evolve through various formats and aesthetics, methodologies and poetics, and put to work a wide spectrum of expressions.

Welcome:
Nele Hertling, dramaturge, theatre director, Director of the Performing Arts Section
Gabriele Brandstetter, theatre, literature and dance scholar

Film screening:
Sommerspiele (Summer Games) (Eszter Salamon, 2023, 26 min)

An echo of the past and a reflection on resurgent nationalism: in the short film Sommerspiele, Eszter Salamon confronts the fictional character of Valeska Gert with the Nazi architecture of the 1936 Summer Olympics. Whilst the architectural remnants of the Nazi past are still present today as venues for entertainment, leisure and sporting events, other historical contexts – such as Gert’s – are poorly documented and have fallen into oblivion.

Drawing on autobiographies, historical facts and art-historical references, Sommerspiele proposes film and performance as means to create a different culture of remembrance and to connect the past and the present. Building on the legacy of Valeska Gert, Salamon examines the representation of the body, ethnicity and gender in order to counteract traces of racist propaganda.

Watch the trailer (Vimeo)

Followed by a talk with Lucia Ruprecht, professor and current head of the Seminar for Critical Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Sandra Noeth, professor at the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin, and Eszter Salamon.

Eszter Salamon lives and works between Berlin, Paris, and Budapest. She is recipient of the Evens Art Prize 2019 and winner of “La vie bonne” call for projects by the National Center for Plastic Arts (FR) and Aware: Archive of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, in 2020.