Iranian-born American artist Tala Madani has been creating paintings and animations for more than 15 years. Employing a playful and sometimes gross-out lightness of touch, Madani satirises our society’s deep-seated patriarchal systems, fallacies and aspirations. In the run-up to Madani’s first major survey, Biscuits, at MOCA in her hometown of Los Angeles, the artist and her husband – the British artist and musician Nathaniel Mellors – recorded several conversations in their kitchen. With occasional contributions from their children Imra, 6, and Roshan, 4, their discussions are accompanied here by a series of incisive new works produced especially for the exhibition. Paintings like those in her Near-Sighted series depict Madani’s attempt to look closely at the things we cannot see, or perhaps the mugginess of those we choose to see instead. Meanwhile … her escapist large-scale Cloud Mommy oil paintings join the ranks of her ongoing Shit Mom works, which are updated here with Shitmom Suicide, a looped animation that traps the viewer in an eternal limbo between expectation and despair.
NATHANIEL MELLORS
OK, I’ve got some questions here that AnOther Magazine wanted to ask you. This is going to be your first survey show in the US. What does it mean to look back at all your work together and do you see any new context now, in hindsight?
TALA MADANI
I think I’ll have a better sense of that when we install, but what I have to draw on is the show that I did in Malmö and Stockholm, where bringing everything together felt very satisfying, in that I really hadn’t seen all the works together before and I didn’t know if I would …
NM Yeah, I remember you thinking you didn’t even know if you’d like them …
TM … If I’d like them all together. Exactly. I make things in order to make them, and the idea that they should
