Tala Madani: Rip Image
Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm, Sweden
25 May-27 October 2013
From the Press Release
Tala Madani is in the midst of making a major international breakthrough. The exhibition Rip Image is her biggest solo exhibition to date and has been the first opportunity for the public to study her oeuvre in depth.
Tala Madani works in painting and animation, examining political subjects such as power structures, masculinity and group dynamics. The viewer is invited into a visual world populated exclusively by middle-aged men engaged in ambiguous and often absurd situations. Madani’s imagery oscillates between abstraction and figuration, seriousness and comedy. Her work invites the viewer to attend situations in which the power structures and male gender roles have been inverted. Complex structures and emotional layers are added to each other until the given interpretations are cancelled out. Madani’s oeuvre confronts human frailty and the great collective and personal challenges of our own era. Her art serves as a social solvent on roles and relations. By playing with stereotypes and symbols, she forces us not only to open our eyes, but also to ask ourselves why we see what we see.
Andreas Nillsson, co-curator of the exhibition comments, ‘Tala Madani discusses and comments on extremely important and urgent subjects today. And by denuding desires and norms she forces us not only to look at society at large but also to challenge our own set of values. In that sense, her work is doubly potent, and she increases its impact through the use of humour and satire in her imagery.”
Tala Madani was born in Iran in 1981 and is now living and working in the USA. She was recently nominated for the art award the Future Generation Art Prize and participated in the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. She has also taken part in group exhibitions at P.S. 1 MoMA (2010), the New Museum in New York and the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biannual (2009). Moderna Museet Malmö is the first museum to give visitors a more comprehensive opportunity to discover her oeuvre. Some 80 paintings, works on paper and several animations will be presented.
