Tala Madani

Tala Madani’s painting, drawing, and animation practice deploys piercing satirical humor and exaggerated visual logic to dismantle normative assumptions about masculinity, patriarchy, and cultural identity. Her protagonists—often middle-aged men—are not depicted as individuals but as cultural models. Through absurdity, awkwardness, and loss of control, Madani dislocates the male body from its historically privileged position and exposes masculinity as a fragile construct rather than a natural condition. She draws from the syntax of cartoons, animation, and popular imagery, while treating paint itself—wet, smearing, seeping, leaking—not as descriptive pigment, but as a material extension of the body. In Madani’s work, humor is never entertainment but a strategy of structural critique.