Opening
Thursday, September 25, 2025
6 to 9 pm
Thursday, November 6, 2025, at 6 pm
Digital Art Program Stream
Alisi Telengut, Materia, 2025
Film Screening and Q & A (in person)
Launching online November 7
Pavilion
Artist and filmmaker Alisi Telengut is based between Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and Berlin, and, in this digital video, she 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 can’t quite reach. Known for her animation work, she revisits found objects from her earlier stop motion films in this film commissioned by The Goldfarb Gallery. Images of skin and hair are juxtaposed with images of stones, revealing the shared material qualities between bodies and landscapes, and the interconnection between human bodies and geological history.
She 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 optical 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, she creates a frame for herself and for the viewer to see and feel the material world anew.
This project is the third in The Goldfarb Gallery’s digital art program stream, which supports born-digital and internet art commissions and presentations. This program began as a series of online conversations, …this is not made of language but energy, led by Clara Halpern. Inspired by the breadth of artists practices within digital contexts, The Goldfarb Gallery established this program to work with artists who create work in this sphere as well as to support those who would if given resources and technical support. This digital stream is designed to highlight the particularities of producing artwork for the internet while also connecting with local, national, and international audiences to provide access, experiences, and conversations across an expanded geography.
Alisi Telengut, working still for Materia, 2025.
Alisi Telengut 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, ancient animistic beliefs, and shamanic rituals in Mongolia and Siberia, Indigenous knowledge, and the reclamation of animism for planetary health and non-human materialities. 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 assistant professor in film animation at Concordia University in Montréal.
Installation team for exhibitions: Uroš Jelić (lead), Phu Bui, Jonah Kamphorst, Matthew Koudys, Nadine Maher, Jordan May, Manny Trinh.
Alisi Telengut’s project is curated by Clara Halpern, assistant curator, exhibitions, and commissioned by The Goldfarb Gallery of York University, with technical support from Michael Maranda, assistant curator, publications. Sound design by Christian Obermaier.
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