Tala Madani, “Be Flat”

by T.s. Flock

University of Washington, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, California

Continues through August 17, 2025

Tala Madani, “Squeegee Men 3,” 2024, oil on linen. All images courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Jueqian Fang, courtesy of the Henry.

For their monographic exhibit of works by Tala Madani, the curatorial team at the Henry Gallery made many excellent decisions, in terms of both selection and installation. Presentation is never to be taken for granted, of course, but Madani’s works present an additional challenge, as they are widely varied in scale and format, from very small paintings to short animations to canvases that tower over the viewer.

Let’s start with the latter. In Madani's largest canvases depicting window washers, the world is reduced to the essentials — a surface to be cleaned, buildings so vast we do not see their edges, only figures suspended in a colorful void. Sometimes the bands of color seem rendered by a single stroke of the squeegee, as if the paint itself were merely a residue. Within these rough flat tints, you may find barely sketched silhouettes that sometimes appear as if smudged on by fingers.  

Tala Madani, “Film Fall (purple),” 2024, oil on linen.

In this play with immensity and erasure, scale is everything. The seemingly infinite facades of the skyscrapers Madani depicts demand attention, induce vertigo, and establish dominance through size. In our increasingly bold global oligarchy, art and architecture share this obsession with monumentality — a luxury that, ironically, rests on the humblest gestures and most precarious labor. The real builders, those who polish, clean and make visible the invisible, are themselves made invisible by their status — precariousness in poverty and immigration status, and readily exploited, from the USA to the UAE. In this troubled reflection, we who stand below and at a great distance, are also left suspended, between fascination and indifference, intimacy and helpless witness.

Power dynamics are a primary motif in Madani’s works, taking on a more grotesque and satirical character in her “Bad Father” paintings. In these much smaller windows into an alternate reality, fatherhood is no longer an honorary title or a role to be assumed when convenient. It is an irrevocable physical attachment. The children are unruly protuberances that act of their own accord. The father can no longer flee or ignore his role. He is rooted to the life he has generated.  

These children are not the idealized reflection of a lineage, but the grotesque extension of masculinity reduced to its purest absurdity — loud, violent, confused. They scream, struggle and take bats to the furniture. For once, the mother is not there to take the blame, to be the guarantor of a failing upbringing. There's no womb to point the finger at, no mother figure to accuse of having spoiled or neglected too much. There are only these men and their children, bound by a cord that cannot be cut.  

In these absurd yet terribly logical scenes, Madani holds a mirror to the certainties of a patriarchal view of fatherhood and shakes them. The child is no longer an idea, an inheritance, a name. The farce that treats boys as a means for men to project their own ego into the future, as “legacy” rendered with vulgar literalism, forces a revelation: The power to give life is not an insignificant privilege nor a way of generating an instrument of one’s own will, but an existential condition from which no one, irrespective of gender, can turn away.

Tala Madani, “Shit Mom Animation,” 2021, single-channel video animation, 7:54 minutes

To insist even this much might be considered blasphemous to the current order, but Madani doesn’t end her provocations there. With her triptych of “altarpieces”, she turns the solemnity of religious iconography against itself, moving from the groin to the fundament. The images are, quite simply, the rear end of a man bent over, anus and hanging scrotum in full view, rendered in painterly monochrome.

This holy image was not entirely Madani’s invention. She is reproducing an actual altarpiece, whose backside portrayed the Cyclopean gaze of an asshole forever directed to the crucifix, a rectum exposed like so many theological gaps. By hiding this element behind the altarpiece, we need not assume that the original’s creator was totally irreverent, though it may look as such. To our modern eyes, trained by centuries of iconoclasm and an increasing disgust with the body’s imperfect frankness, what passes for sacred and profane remains in flux.

Tala Madani, “Sports Dads (R&R),” 2024, oil on linen.

With Madani, this trio of fundaments is also the most literal example of her ability to point to the otherwise hidden, the invisible work that supports all apparent grandeur. What any official history emphasizes — authority figures, sacred ideals — only holds because something else is exploited or denied. In the balance Madani maintains between the comic and the tragic, we are forced to reckon with the embarrassing revelation that the veneer of the divine always conceals a much cruder truth. 

This reversal is fully in line with Madani’s approach. Where sacred art once imposed moral and spiritual authority, it now substitutes a corporeal grotesque which demystifies any pretension to grandeur. Humor in this context is not content to be a mockery, it becomes a tool of delegitimizing power structures without direct challenging them. It’s a consistent feature among artists who grew up amid theocratic and authoritarian regimes, though such plausible deniability regarding interpretation never offers full protection to artists. 

This threat of violence — even of dismemberment — comes out more explicitly in Madani’s animations, if still with a morbid playfulness. They are hand drawn: Soft colors, round shapes, a feigned naivety reminiscent of one’s first sketches scribbled in crayon or finger paints. This childlike style belies the more adult content that follows. Madani knows where to press, and does so free of irony.

Tala Madani, “Corner Projection (Alsatian),” 2019, oil on linen.

For example, a hand plays with a spring, makes it dance, bends it with the amazed insistence of a child who is just discovering the flexibility of things. Then the spring cuts. Suddenly, a finger falls off. The hand continues, fascinated, oblivious to its own wound. One more shot. Another. By the end, all that remains is a trembling stump, brutalized by the mechanics of its own game.

In another, a succession of men transforms into furniture and appliances as they read instruction manuals. Their grumbling and grunts of horror only add to the absurdity. Then a child appears, smashing their inanimate but sentient forms — a bloodless blood bath.

Tala Madani. “Be Flat,” installation view, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2024.

Then there is the image of a young girl projected in a dark room where two viewers observe her in a white void. Suddenly, it is she who scrutinizes them, who pulls them into the screen, and shoves them — in a most extreme inversion — into her birth canal and finally allows the void its total erasure.

What begins in play ends in dismemberment; what seems a simple task becomes a trap. With Madani, the absurd is never gratuitous. It is the weapon of unease, the lever that pries the lid off the ark. We watch, we laugh, we cringe. And when it’s time to look away, we realize that it is too late: We are already swallowed.

T.s. Flock is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle.