Laura Taler: Matryoshka Crush

AXENÉO7, Gatineau

Laura Taler in Matryoshka Crush, photo Melanie Mathieu

Laura Taler: Matryoshka Crush

June 11 – August 16, 2025
AXENÉO7, Gatineau

Poison, exorcism, gender trouble, song and dance intermingle in this darkly funny and disturbing tale of intense yearning. When a series of adorable monsters reveal themselves near an old tavern, their ordinary acts transform into a chain of micro-disobediences.

Matryoshka Crush, a film set inside a makeshift cinema, plays on a loop, while across the centre’s galleries, a series of activations illuminate the allure of theatricality. Moving seamlessly between banal reality and absurdist fantasy, Matryoshka Crush straddles installation, contemporary video art, dancefilm, and personal narrative.

The film centers around four characters. Wearing a series of masks, one layered upon the other like Matryoshka nesting dolls, Laura Taler plays KUKERI, BIG HEAD, HAIRY FACE MEDUSA, and LITTLE HEAD. Each recall, respectively, nature and magic, the old world, female rage, and childlike wonder. The result is a visceral and material-based performance that tells an unmoored story of bodies out of place, with fuzzy, penetrable boundaries. Hilarious, lusty, and troubling, the actions of the characters orbit around an old tavern, an in-between place to rest, clean, feed, pleasure, and entertain.

Like the history of the Matryoshka doll, a symbol of Eastern European culture that can be traced back to the Japanese Fukurama doll, Matryoshka Crush magnifies the desire for translation and transformation. It’s a lament to the old world and how we are enmeshed in one another. Ancient stories linger, but Matryoshka Crush crushes our crush on narrative conventions, leading to liberation and self-invention.

The exhibition Matryoshka Crush is the result of an invitation extended to the artist to take over AXENÉO7’s three galleries. It takes the form of an installation punctuated by spatial interventions and includes the continuous projection of the film, Matryoshka Crush, whose tale begins anew every hour on the hour.

Matryoshka Crush was created with the support of Ottawa Dance Directive, Affinity Productions, City of Ottawa, and Canada Council for the Arts.

The exhibition presented at AXENÉO7 is supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario, Daimon, SAW, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Canada Council for the Arts, and the City of Gatineau.

Laura Taler in Matryoshka Crush, photo Melanie Mathieu

About the Artist

Romanian-born Canadian artist Laura Taler works across a range of media including performance, film, sound, sculpture, and installation. Her work explores how memory and history are linked to movement and how the body is able to carry the past without being oppressed by it. Taler began her career as a contemporary dance choreographer before turning her attention to filmmaking and visual art. Her work has been praised for its unique combination of emotional resonance, wit, and striking visuals. She has been a resident at the Banff Center for the Arts, Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires), Carleton Immersive Media Studio (Ottawa), Ottawa Dance Directive, Unpack Studio (Havana) and a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin). Awards include a Gold Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival, the Best Experimental Documentary award from Hot Docs!, Best of the Festival from New York’s Dance on Camera Festival, and SAW Gallery’s Dennis Tourbin Prize for New Performance. Most recently, her public art audio work MONAHAN was awarded the 2024 Creative City Network of Canada’s Public Art Legacy Award. To mark the 30th anniversary of her first film the village trilogy, screenings and master classes will take place in the 2025/26 season across Canada.

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About AXENÉO7

Founded in 1983, AXENÉO7 is an artist-run centre dedicated to advocating, promoting, and exhibiting the visual arts, while developing critical discourse around them. It is a gathering place for sharing and experimentation. Through a critically engaged program, it endeavours to expand the parameters of artistic practice and its presentation, and to improve artists’ conditions for production.