So German!
THREE SONGS is rooted in Taler’s personal history of leaving Romania as a child and eventually settling in Canada. Her videos explore such themes as familial ties, loss, displacement and experiences of duality—of being caught between places—that are familiar to those creating new lives in different countries.
Produced sequentially over six years, THREE SONGS features Taler as a series of doppelgängers—fictional characters that look like her—singing in languages other than English for the camera.
In Song #1, we find Taler alone in a German forest, singing Uite asa as vrea sa mor (This is how I’d like to die), a Romanian drinking song.
In Song #2, she sings El adiós (The Goodbye), an Argentinean tango song, at her late grandmother’s farmhouse in Romania.
Song #3, set at Berlin’s historic Theater im Delphi and at the Gipsformerei, one of the world’s largest plaster cast replica workshops, features Taler performing Romania Romania, a Yiddish song celebrating the flourishing of Jewish and Romanian culture between WW I and WW II.
Interweaving Taler’s vocal performances with cinematic attention to the surrounding site and contemplation of how gestures can express the histories and experiences the body carries, THREE SONGS is both joyful tribute and elegy. THREE SONGS evokes the dislocations and relocations of immigration, and how movement blurs endings and beginnings.
Please note that THREE SONGS is a time-based work that takes approximately one hour to experience in its entirety.
You are warmly invited to the launch party celebrating the opening of THREE SONGS on September 25th. Please join us for the Stonecroft Symposium organized to complement the exhibition, with a series of events grounded in music, poetry and conversation.
Born and raised in Romania, Laura Taler moved with her family to Italy, and then to Canada. She is now an internationally renowned choreographer, filmmaker and artist, based in Ottawa.
