Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 6

Born 1981 in Tehran, Iran
Lives in Los Angeles, CA

In the suite of works on view in the 2017 Biennial, Tala Madani asks what it might mean for the body to be full of light, a substance associated—at least since the ancient Greeks—with the mind rather than the body, pure spirit rather than materiality, and men rather than women. Madani renders these ancient patriarchal divisions absurd in a series of brilliantly colored paintings in which various orifices emit light from bodies’ interiors. “Front projections” suggest life, desire, and creativity, while scatological “rear projections” are ecstatic and nightmarish all at once. A sunset produced mechanically through screenprinting becomes part of a meditation on the cycle of life and death, while in an animated video, a luminous God delivers a lesson in sexual education.