Tala Madani: Biscuits Book Signing and Blackboard (Further Education) Limited Edition T-Shirt Release

SCHEDULE CHANGE
NEW DATE AND TIME:
Saturday, February 18, 2023, 2–4pm

Join us at MOCA Store at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on Saturday, February 18th from 2⁠–4pm for a book signing with artist Tala Madani to celebrate the exhibition catalogue Tala Madani: Biscuits. The store will also be releasing a limited edition t-shirt showcasing Madani’s Blackboard (Further Education) (2021) as an all-over print.

Tala Madani: Biscuits accompanies the first North American survey of the Iranian-born artist’s paintings and animations. Organized by MOCA, the exhibition brings together more than fifteen years of the artist’s incisive work, highlighting the often absurd socio-cultural dynamics enacted within Madani’s art and, more broadly, the potent and combustible relationship between art history and global history. The accompanying publication–for which Blackboard (Further Education) also serves as the cover image–is the most comprehensive on Madani’s work to date. Paintings and animations from Madani’s major series dating from 2005 to the present are represented by approximately eighty plates along with a selection of pages from her sketchbooks, published for the first time and offering a rare look at the rich process by which the artist develops her ribald menagerie of characters. The catalog also features a conversation between Madani and Ali Subotnick, guest curator of the exhibition, as well as new essays by Rebecca Lowery, MOCA Assistant Curator; Maggie Nelson, acclaimed Los Angeles-based writer; and Evan Calder Williams, Associate Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. These essays range from personal to critical, encompassing contemplations of motherhood and sexual politics, as well as contextualizing Madani’s work in art history.

Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran, lives and works in Los Angeles) makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflections on gender, idealistic notions of childhood and family, political authority, and who and what gets represented in the art historical canon. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, revealing a complex vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her work is held in the collections of major museums worldwide and has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including recent solo exhibitions at KM21, The Hague, Netherlands (2022), and Start Museum, Shanghai (2020). Madani earned a BFA from Oregon State University in 2004 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006. She was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize in 2020.