Tala Madani (b. 1981)

'Iranian-American artist Tala Madani paints a provocative and humorous discourse on cultural and sexual identity. Picturing the male domain in all its stereotypical glory, Madani’s portraits of Middle Eastern men play out fictive rituals of a deviant, distinctly female imagination: prayer gatherings twisted into homosexual orgies, birthday parties targeted for terrorist attack, and tattoos and body hair plucking construed as the latest in ultra-macho beauty makeovers.
Madani’s Nosefall uses cartoonish exaggeration to comically devise an army of ineffectual suicide bombers. Taking ideas of macho identity to the extreme, Madani’s characters become unwittingly effeminate buffoons, undermined by their own zeal. Their prostate devotional poses ironically double as sexually submissive positions, a joke enhanced by suggestively phallic parachutes and pink mankini uniforms. Hardly the image of international threat, the entire squad is prone to high altitude nosebleeds. Madani paints this with subtle variation of style, using a combination of solid flat patterns and hurried sketching to create a sense of floating or weightlessness; the splash marks of gushing blood hint that the men have never left the ground.'
Patricia Ellis