Laura Taler

Lives and works in Canada

Artist statement

I am a Romanian-born Canadian artist working across performance, film, and video installation. I began my career as a contemporary dance choreographer before turning my attention to filmmaking and visual art. Throughout my career I have explored the links between movement, voice, memory, and history by using cinematic and choreographic devices to articulate how the body is able to carry the past without being oppressed by it. My work continually suggests that the body is linked to knowledge. Film scholar Aboubakar Sanogo once wrote that my work “demonstrates that it is possible to philosophize with the medium of cinema.” Reflecting on a split-screen scene from my installation THREE SONGS (2022), he describes how I appear simultaneously as observer and observed—standing at a window inside Berlin’s Gipsformerei while my doppelgänger crosses a courtyard below. Revisiting Auguste Comte’s claim that one cannot be “on a balcony and see oneself walking down the street,” Sanogo suggests that the sequence reveals cinema’s capacity to hold subjectivity and objectivity in co-presence. His reading has prompted me to consider how this fluid negotiation shapes my practice and how my filmic movement-based installations resist fixed categories; colleagues have described my recent work Matryoshka Crush (2025) as “genre-defying” and “refreshingly unclassifiable.” My process begins in the body. I work in the studio to generate material through movement and voice improvisation, allowing...

Artwork