ART-PRESENTATION: Tala Madani-First Light
Tala Madani makes paintings and animated videos whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique. She uses humor not only to upend social mores, but also to open up dialogue about cultural forms that too often remain in the background of collective awareness. In so doing, she also upsets formal and art historical conventions, openly embracing caricature, gags, and disarming simplicity as she develops and hones the conceptual underpinnings of each body of work.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MIT List Visual Arts Center Archive
In her exhibition “First Light” Tala Madani, presents a series of new paintings as well as a stop-motion animation made expressly for her presentation at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. For more than ten years, Madani has developed a practice centered on playful yet provocative representations of men. Drawing from her Iranian heritage where strict social etiquette creates a division between the sexes, Madani’s paintings gleefully envision what she imagines to be the ‘goings on’ at men-only events. Bright pastel color fields form the ground for group scenes in which balding, rotund, and mustachioed middle-aged men blindly follow each other in circles, undergo interrogation, and perform various humiliating acts. The exhibition encompasses the full scope of her larger related body of work, titled “Smiley Has No Nose”, alongside selected works from earlier series. Many of the paintings feature the presence of illumination, for example, light beams directed at group of kneeling men in “Projections” or car headlights in “The Primitive”. A theological turn also finds troubling expression in works that do not refer directly to the smiley itself. The painting “Adoption” depicts a man, reduced to the size of a child, climbing through a transparent “painting” of the Virgin Mary. As he ruptures the picture plane, it appears as though the Virgin is embracing him, he looks up at her painted visage, expecting her to return his affection. Throughout each of these works, Madani’s figures are involved in the drawing, redrawing, and undrawing of their surroundings and relationships. Nothing is off limits: bodily fluids, beams of light, toothpaste, i.e., any substance or object that can make a line or leave a mark is employed in acts of simultaneous creation and destruction. Madani’s work in stop-motion animation, by contrast, is in conversation with such diverse traditions as animated cartoons and the filmic experiments of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century. In making reference to the improbable physics of cartoons, where flattened figures can bounce back into shape and physical boundaries are infinitely elastic, Madani’s paintings and videos open up an unruly, anarchic space examining pervasive gender, racial, and ethnic visual stereotypes. Spanning medium, historical period, and culture, this amalgam of references enriches Madani’s larger investigation into human fantasy and folly.
Info: Curators: Kelly Shindler and Henriette Huldisch, The MIT List Visual Arts Center, Wiesner Bldg, 20 Ames St, Cambridge, Duration: 20/5-17/7/16, Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://listart.mit.edu
