Mothers are worried

Concert dessiné with Inger Hannisdal and Karen Keyrouz

Tuesday 16 September, at 18:00–18:45

65–200 kr

35 % off with ultiMATE

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 is a monster that is coming to get us", Karen said to Inger in the autumn of 2023, as the war escalated in Lebanon. In both Beirut and Oslo, the two artists had noticed something strange: their mothers had started speaking in a different tone. "This might be the end of the world," Karen’s mother said, not with panic, but with the calm of a weather report. Inger’s mother had begun to say similar things. That growing unease, quiet, dissonant, and oddly matter-of-fact, was more disturbing than fear itself.

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

Inger Hannisdal’s violin and cassette loops, drawing from Norwegian folk music and Arabic maqam, and Karen 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.

What begins as a conversation between two artists becomes an act of resistance—a joint effort to trace the shape of a danger not yet arrived, but already present.

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.