Modern Mothers was filmed in the set of Dafna Maimon’s immersive performance “Modern Lives” shown at Lilith Performance Studio in 2016. Both the performance and the later video are based on the artist’s mother, who, in the early 2000s, took on an alter ego; a goldsmith’s widow from the 1860s, as a means of playful escape from her reality. Within the widow’s repeating domestic maze, layered loops of actions appear familiar at first glance but are ultimately surreal in nature, and create an emotional landscape constructed through motion, time, and space. The widow, performed by the artist’s mother and a cast of doppelgängers, investigate self-construction and the workings of trauma through alter egos and phantom-bodies within a choreography of repetition.