RESEARCHTala Madani: Whetting Our Darkest Appetite

My first encounter with Tala Madni’s work was at the eleventh hour to her 2014 solo exhibition in London. The show had actually official closed for a quarter-hour, and we only managed to wander in after my companion had charmed the gallery assistant in French.

The haste of the trip was surely intensified, because although Madani’s work is immediate, it is not so in the attention it requires of the viewer. The work is an outburst of the artist’s energy, which is translated through the slithery butter-like paint. The swivelling of the brush can be traced through the succinct description of a crawling baby or a defeated mother dissolving in multiple directions (Shit Mom (Access), 2019).

The paintings are urgent, as if in a contentious race with the artist’s own thoughts. However it is a race where one would inevitably put money on the artist. Madani has been training for years. A window sill (Prism Waves, 2019) or the murky water splashing out of a bucket (The Cleaner, 2016) is brutally contoured by the decisive path of one single brushstroke. A balding head does not need illustration of every hair follicle, but one sufficiently tubby stroke stretching from the left ear to the right (Headbug, 2009, colour animation).

The strokes are certain. A firmness in the calligraphic outlines may come from roots in Eastern painting – be it calligraphic characters that take up formative roles in Persian painting, or a single stroke that resolutely describes an entire flowing robe of a monk in Chinese painting. Their immediacy also comes from a resolution innate to any painter – to describe with the utmost efficiency.

Today we are undergoing unprecedented shifts in our relationship to the physical space. The virtual has assimilated into the physical; our familiarity with digital gadgets and user interfaces has disrupted the illusion of depth. Disregarding perspectival dogma (and perhaps to emphasise that perspectival space is only a Western invention), spaces in Madani’s paintings operate on multiple levels. In Shit Mom (Access) (2019), for example, we are instantaneously brought out of the painting as soon as we enter it. The access to the painting’s space (which is crudely suggested by a grid in perspectival configuration) is contradicted by the dissipating “shit mom” that is clinging on to the surface of the canvas by mechanisms of physics.

The blacked interior is also a reoccurring space in Madani’s work. Peculiar though, as the spaces do not possess definitive boundaries. The peripheral confinement of the space suggests that perhaps the viewer is looking at something through a peephole, at something private and intimate. It may be a dimmed living room where an armchair is lit by a lonely television (TBC, 2017), or an obscured corner of a vast grimy nightclub (Shitty Disco, 2016).

More so than any other space, the nightclub is a masculine space. It is one of the longest standing institutions that was born to serve a male patronage – a place for gambling, commercial sex, and for business and political favours. It is where patriarchal social structures function at their best – lurking men seeking targets upon
which to discharge their sexual energy, whilst women exhibit sexual enticements for their pleasure. Madani’s clubs are filled with glaring laser projections. Powdery scents and sweaty odours seem to exude from the paintings, emulating the clammy ecstasy of the morning hours. Filth and pleasure intertwine throughout Madani’s works, much to the gratification of the main subject – balding men.

Yet the paintings strip apart the men’s respectable façade, revealing that farcical acts might be performed to maintain a sacred pact of some sort or to ends we can only guess (Human wave on set, 2011). The men are rather vulnerable and are archetypally middle-aged. They’re stripped of their clothes, wearing only tiny jockstraps and exposing sagging torsos that are the by-products of their age-old habits. At a time where gender definitions are being rattled – Google’s AI tool for example announced earlier this year that it will no longer add gender labels to images – we may look at Madani’s work and ponder on the patriarchal institution, as well as the seismic shift that needs to take place before any sense of gender liberation can be achieved.

There’s a sense of shame that comes with the men’s exhibition of bare (literally and figuratively) truth. Comedy is accompanied by, more importantly, humiliated fury. Shame and discomfort do not bring about humility in these men. On the contrary, they’re transposed into acts of violence – very much emulating real world incidents where the distress of humiliation and dishonour is turned into domestic violence. Madani blatantly exposes the problems of our current patriarchal social structure.

What the works also reveal is the sadist and the voyeuristic nature of ourselves. I am reminded of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Although Sontag’s analogy largely lies between war and photography, the same thread of thought can be applied to Madani’s work. The swift, impolite painterly language is proven a necessary for the subject matter: when facing images of atrocities or savagery, we have always appreciated ones that are less polished, because in turn they seem less manipulated for dramatic effect. We find ourselves absorbed by these images of violence, especially her animation works.

As we watch Madani’s animation though our fingers, we do not relinquish our appetite for abjection, nor our morbid curiosity as we continue to observe the gruesome fates which befall these men – piling rocks on one another (Underman, 2012, colour animation), being choked to spout musical notes in the form of ejaculations (Music Man, 2009, colour animation), or being slapped to death by a baby in a hospital bed (Hospital, 2009, colour animation) or a giant pink penis (The Audience, 2018, colour animation). In essence, we either become uneasy spectators or recoiling cowards, culprit in the absurdity and brutality of the current social structure.

Nonetheless, as a fellow female artist, I am relieved though that a matriarchal alternative is not provided by the artist, as matriarchy is yet another oppressive power structure. Instead, infants take centre stage in Madani’s recent paintings. Vitally rooted in the philosophy of Quran (as well as Chinese philosophy), the babies represent an innocence and freedom that we’re born with, much to the contrast of Western Christianity’s “original sin”. Be it tasting shit or defecating in the middle of the dance floor (Shitty Disco II, 2016), they represent an equivocally unembellished curiosity. Symbolising the naivety that comes at birth before the effects of human attributions, the babies impel us to urgently reassess of our social contract today.