Materia

Alisi Telengut

commission

Alisi Telengut, still from Materia, 2025.

Link to the artwork: https://materia.thegoldfarbgallery.ca/
Materia is best viewed full screen.

In the film Materia, Alisi Telengut explores found objects and her local surroundings. Exploring familiar contexts with a macro lens and small handheld digital microscope in hand, she enters a visual territory that ordinary cinematography does not usually reach. She also incorporates images of skin and hair juxtaposed with shots of stones, revealing the shared material qualities between bodies and landscapes and the interconnection between human bodies and geological history.

Telengut writes, “at a macro scale, the familiar suddenly becomes topographical, the ridges on a small stone catch light like folded metal. Pushing further into the microscopic realm exposes even richer textures that are invisible to the naked eye yet carry the material ‘fingerprints’ of each medium.”

Choosing to work with a portable, low-tech setup as opposed to the calibrated optics of a biology lab, Telengut’s visual tools preserve a slight roughness, collapsing the distance between scientific observation and artistic image-making. She explains that “the macro lens offers cinematic intimacy, while the microscope pushes beyond the limits of human vision, turning ordinary objects into abstract terrain. Together they blur the boundary between factual detail and poetic interpretation.” Through this process, the artist creates a frame for herself and for the viewer to see and feel the material world anew.

Alisi Telengut, based between Tiohtià;ke/Montréal and Berlin, is a Canadian artist and filmmaker of Mongolian roots. Her practice has included handmade painterly animated films created frame by frame under the camera. In in her work, she explores a diverse array of subjects, including endangered languages, animistic beliefs and shamanic rituals in Mongolia and Siberia, Indigenous knowledge, and the reclamation of animism for the health of the planet. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, in contexts that include the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, USA; the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Sundance Film Festival; TIFF and TIFF Canada’s Top Ten; Annecy International Animation Festival, France; Videonale X, Germany; Ostrale Biennale, Germany; Anthology Film Archives, USA; CICA Museum, South Korea; UNESCO World Heritage Site Zollverein, Germany; Images Festival; and Image Forum, Japan; among others. Telengut is currently an assistant professor in film animation at Concordia University in Montréal.

Materia, 2025, is the third commission in The Goldfarb Gallery’s digital art program stream, which supports born-digital and internet art commissions and presentations. Telengut’s project is curated by Clara Halpern, assistant curator, exhibitions, and commissioned by The Goldfarb Gallery, with technical support from Michael Maranda, assistant curator, publications, and Jonah Kamphorst.