|
Tala Madini paints a provocative and humorous discourse on cultural and sexual identity. Picturing the male domain in all its stereotypical glory, Madini’s portraits of Middle Eastern men play out fictive rituals of a deviant, distinctly female imagination: prayer gatherings twisted into homosexual orgies, birthday parties targeted for terrorist attack, and tattoos and body hair plucking construed as the latest in ultra-macho beauty makeovers. In devising her scenes of aberrant ceremony, Madini pinpoints the very essence of frustration, fervour, and inadequacy.
Appropriating the preconceptions of racial and gender difference as a departure point into the bizarre and surreal, Madini uses her position of ‘other’ to draft her own elaborate fantasies, detailing a riotous underworld of cliquey sect-like subterfuge. The motif of the birthday cake recurs in Madini’s paintings as an emblem of masculine ego. The impotence of melting candles protracting to the ultimate conclusion of ‘blow them out/blow them up’, as pink gooey pastries become the signature trademark of her maverick suicide bombers.
BIOGRAPHY
1981
Born in Tehran, Iran
Lives and works in New Haven
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2007
Lombard-Freid Projects, New York
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2005
Green Gallery, Graduate Show, Yale University
2003
Fairbanks Gallery, Senior Exhibition, Oregon State University
Studio 580, Group Show, Bend
Article Theme :-
Tala Madini assured fusion of the formal and the narrative evokes both Persian miniatures and Western political cartoons. The cakes are apparently multipurpose instruments of celebration, torture and ritual bonding. In “Chest Burn” and “Hand Burn on Back” men char their hands over the candles and then press them into other men’s flesh. In “Embodying Cake” one man places candles on the heavily tattooed shoulders of another. Elsewhere the cakes suggest bombs, ski masks or soap.
Read Entire Article about Artist Tala Madani paintings and artwork at The Saatchi-Gallery http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/tala_madani.htm |
