THREE SONGS
Song #1 (2015-2019)
Song #2 (2017-2019)
Song #3 (2019-2020)
multi-channel installation with stereo sound
photo: ©Dagmar Morath
September 2022 at the Carleton University Art Gallery.
“ …never before our time have so
many people been uprooted. Emigration,
forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is
the quintessential experience of our time.“
—John Berger (And Our Faces My Heart, Brief as Photos 1984)
THREE SONGS is a series of
multi-channel, spatial video installations, in which Laura Taler grapples with questions raised by experiences
of migration. Appearing as her döppleganger, Taler sings three
songs: A Romanian song in a German
forest, an Argentinean tango at her late Grandmother’s house in Romania, and in
Berlin’s historic Theatre Im Delphi and Gipsformerei — one of the world’s
largest plaster cast replica workshops — a Yiddish song titled “Romania Romania”.
Catalyzed by her past and
by the current refugee crisis, THREE SONGS explores questions of what it is to
be “foreign”, and of language, untranslatability, loss, mourning and the
reshaping of identity. How does one make a home in a different place, come to
terms with what has been left behind, and imagine and create new futures?
In Song #1: Uite asa as vrea sa mor (This is how I’d
like to die), she sings a Romanian song to the trees, ferns and birds in a
German forest. Sung in her mother tongue with relish and mischief, Taler
perform this drinking and dying song accompanied by a series of gestures and
finger snaps — the mark of quiet applause and approval. If snapping could speak
it might say, “Yes! I feel your pain”. Besides, you can’t clap and hold a drink
at the same time.
In Song #2: El
Adios (The Goodbye) she sings an Argentinean tango at her late
Grandmother’s house in Romania. In this work, Taler tackles what Chris Kraus
describes as emotion “pursued as discipline, as form” by addressing the
separation from her homeland in the language she choose to learn as an adult.
The actions in the video are comprised of a series of practical tasks, from
folding linens to practicing dance steps. An atmosphere of stillness and
repetition envelops the work and gestures towards the labour of mourning, an activity
that must happen with and in front of other people.
In Song #3, Taler performs Romania Romania, a Yiddish song that speaks of a bygone era full of
food, wine, and celebration. The work is shot inside Berlin’s Gipsformerei, the
world’s largest plaster cast replica workshop, where sculptures are remade
though molds and plaster, and at the Theater Im Delphi, one of the best
remaining examples of a silent film theatre. The song harks back to what was
once considered the golden age of Romania when, between the two world wars,
Jewish and Romanian culture blossomed, despite continued discrimination.
Although the song is about a specific place, the name Romania and the specific
foods could easily be replaced by places more recently destroyed by wars. These
wars, fought in the name of nationalism, propriety and vengeance, leave
people’s homes and lives destroyed and displace them into the absurd. A song of
joy becomes a song of mourning.
THREE SONGS is exhibited as three, multi-channel video installations
that play on continuous loops. The work will premiere
in a solo show at the Carleton
University Art Gallery in September 2022.