With hypnotic imagery and mixed media, Alisi Telengut, a Canadian artist of Mongolian descent, delves deep into the dynamic relationships between humans and nature. Her frame-by-frame, hand-painted animations blur the line between visual art and ethnographic storytelling. Working primarily with pastel and mixed media under the camera, Alisi creates extraordinary movement through painterly textures, exploring nomadic and Indigenous ways of life in Mongolia and beyond.
She has been interested in painting since childhood. Yet she chose to go to a film school – “by chance”, as she describes it – where she started her formal education in film animation. Now living between Berlin, Germany, and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada, Telengut creates animation frame by frame under the camera using mixed media to generate movement, while exploring handmade and painterly visuals. To her, animating (mostly) on a single surface is an accumulative process, embodying one of the key expressions of a creator’s mind through hands-on practice and engagement with physical materials.
Her creative process revolves around the under-camera workflow – a kind of time-lapse photography of painting. Being created frame by frame by hand on a single surface means that every new frame erases the previous one. Leaving little to no room for any mistakes but allowing many possibilities, the technique conveys ideas in a mesmerising way.
Not only contributing to ethnographic and ethnocultural research, her work also aims at introducing the audiences to the perception of nature understood beyond the Eurocentric point of view, as in many cultures, it is considered as alive and to be worshipped as a deity. Telengut believes that amid the modern existential crisis and accelerating human-driven environmental change, reclaiming animist perspectives becomes essential for planetary well-being and recognition of non-human materialities.
For instance, The Fourfold (2020), which won the Best Animated Film Award at the 2022 Brussels Independent Film Festival, is based on the ancient animistic beliefs and shamanic rituals in Mongolia and Siberia she heard about as a child from her grandparents. They used to live as nomads on the Mongolian grassland – sharing it all in the film becomes then an exploration of the indigenous worldview and wisdom. While Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal (2023) reimagines the formation of Lake Baikal in Siberia, the deepest freshwater lake in the world. The indigenous Buryat people believe that an eagle transformed into the first shaman along the lake shore, where both humans and non-humans are experienced in an animate community. With hand-painted animation and found objects, featuring the voice of an Indigenous woman who can still recall some words in her endangered Buryat language, we experience the hypnotic tale.
In this episode of Kitchen Conversations, the conversation centres on Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal, its production and inspiration.
Kithen Conversation is a platform for conversations with artists, curators, and researchers about their visual and socially engaged work, all connected to the vibrant and diverse region known as “Eastern Europe”, with all its complexities, histories, cultures, traumas, and their inevitable contemporary consequences. The podcast is hosted by a Polish artist and writer, Patrycja Rozwora.
