To experience Tala Madani’s exhibition is to be submerged in a world that rejects our dualist minds and embraces the proximity of attraction to repulsion, cleanliness to filth. Upon entering the museum, viewers are greeted by a large-scale painting depicting a pair of splayed ass cheeks resembling the rolling hills of a sublime landscape, which in turn mesmerizes a group of frumpy caricatured men who run frantically about with their arms outstretched, holding lumps of poop to offer the holy hole. Adjacent to this is a painting of a banana performing stand-up (its slimy peel limps in a gesture of vulnerability), which seems to make the disclaimer—this exhibition is a comedy, so bring a sense of humor. Madani makes drawings, paintings, and films that evoke primal-human themes such as shame, fear, and desire, depicting monstrous penises that slap and strangle their own bodies, cumming and squirming with delight and disgust—babies that feast on their mothers covered in shit, their tiny fingers playing in the curdled brown mush. In these absurd scenarios, shame hides in the shadowy spaces of a door slightly ajar or the crook of a Venetian blind. In the beams of blaring light that manage to seep into Madani’s scenes, my imagination conjures a roaring sitcom-style laugh track—a robust cackling laughter that sounds artificial because the spectator and spectacle are equally grotesque, equally covered in shit, piss, and cum—equally human. As Madani makes us viscerally aware of our own pimpled, porous, oozing bodies that are simultaneously distant and familiar, internal and external, she also points to (even if only to laugh at) the prescribed divisions and systems that order and attempt to regulate our lives. Madani’s corporeal carnival feels like a modern-day Gargantua and Pantagruel—it’s filthy but fun.

Program note: MOCA is hosting a free lecture between Tala Madani and author Ottessa Moshfegh on today (Thursday, December 8th) at 6:30 pm.  

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
On view through February 19, 2023