Festival 2025

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Mothers are worried

Concert dessiné with Inger Hannisdal and Karen Keyrouz

Tuesday 16 September, at 18:00–18:45

65–200 kr

A visual artist and a violinist meet on stage. As one draws, the other plays. Together they conjure a world where something is creeping closer.

«It’s like there’s a monster that’s coming to get us», illustrator and graphic novelist Karen Keyrouz said to the Norwegian violinist Inger Hannisdal last fall, a few weeks before the war escalated in Lebanon.

In conversations, they discussed their mothers. «This might be the end of the world», Karen’s mother had told her. She had not sounded scared, she had said it like she was talking about the weather. «My mother has started talking like that», said Inger; even in Oslo, where war still reaches us only through our screens. Hearing it from their mothers, they agreed, was more disturbing than feeling it themselves, like discovering that a promise of violence had already seeped into our safest, most intimate spaces.

Mothers are worried is a concert dessiné: a live drawing performance in which music and image unfold in tandem.

Hannisdal’s violin and cassette loops, drawing from Norwegian folk music and Arabic maqam, and Keyrouz’s projected drawings evolve alongside each other in a dance of lines and sound.

The performance moves between small details and large fears, personal conversation and shared anxiety. It imagines violence not as a sudden rupture, but as a substance—viscous, sticky, slow-moving, and omnipresent—seeping like ink or fog into homes, routines, inner thoughts and other spaces once thought safe.

Facts

Concert dessiné is a format from French comics culture, here adapted into a personal and experimental collaboration.
On the work, Inger Hannisdal and Karen Keyrouz say:
We began this work through conversations—about our mothers, about what fear sounds like, and how violence seeps into everyday life. Drawing and music became our way of listening to that atmosphere together.
Since October 2023, Lebanon has seen escalated violence along its southern border, linked to the war in Gaza. The conflict has caused displacement, destruction, and fear of wider escalation.