Tala Madani’s Shit Moms

The mother-and-child motif is an art history staple. But Tala Madani's recent series ‘Shit Moms’ (2019–) offers a bracingly fresh take on motherhood. The paintings and animations show a female character covered in feces who leaves traces everywhere she goes while caring for her increasingly brown, besmeared children. The series came into being almost by chance. The Iranian-born American artist didn’t paint for eight months after the birth of her second child, she tells me from her studio in Los Angeles, where she has lived with her family since graduating from Yale University School of Art and spending several years in Europe (which included a residency at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie), and just wanted to ‘make something for myself, something personal.’ She started painting a mother and child and was repulsed by the kitschness of what she saw, she recalls. To fight her disgust, she started smearing the painting. ‘By accident I didn’t smear the baby first, and this juxtaposition appeared – a mother covered in shit holding a pristine, untouched baby.’

Leaving any rose-tinted vision of motherhood far behind, Madani portrays a mother as a shape-shifting pile of poop who’s gradually falling apart. The children are the narrators. ‘The Shit Mom is not scaring the children,’ Madani says. ‘She’s being strangled by them and she’s used by them. Maybe she was even created by them. Maybe if there’s no mom, you would prefer to have a shit mom rather than no mother at all.’ When the mother and the children touch, they seem to collide, like everything that the mother comes into contact with. This idea of contamination is central to the work, Madani continues. ‘As a mother, you’re constantly checking yourself – what of myself am I bestowing on this creature right now? You are constantly negotiating yourself. How much of yourself is left? Motherhood comes with frustration and social pressure. Will the new mother fit the path laid out for her?’

Pregnancy – and the accompanying parenthood – is a rite of passage, rich in symbolism. Death, divorce, or profound love are among the great stories in art. In the history of painting, we are used to angelic depictions of babies and holy mothers breastfeeding gently. Madani’s literal shit storm is the complete opposite of that. It annihilates any widely received idea of what a good mother is supposed to be and look like. Let alone a good artist. This tension between being an artist and a mother runs through the series. As an artist you must be able to focus fully on your own work, your thoughts, and ideas. You have to be of the world. The child makes a claim on that availability, and as parent you have to be physically and mentally available for your children. This availability attributed to motherhood instills fear and deters people from it. While there is a logical connection between making, shaping, and creating life and art, the subject of the mother as artist has long been ignored within art and literature. Serving thus invisible.

Madani’s Shit Mom is the opposite of the invisible mother – she takes up a lot of physical space: She’s dirty, smells and drips with poop. The long, sad brown trails she leaves everywhere she goes manifest her entrapment and capture the challenges of her condition. But this depiction of motherhood also shines with hope. Madani’s Shit Mom is unhampered by conventions and expectations. Guilelessly unaware, she challenges centuries of virginal, art-historical mothers.

‘We all have mothers and are constantly complaining about our shit moms to our friends and in psychoanalysis,’ Madani says. ‘But we haven’t had the audacity, nor the culture, to create a new visual identity.’ In recent years, Madani has pushed the Shit Mom concept in her paintings and animations. ‘I became interested in the shit mom as a personification of the anxiety, of the imperfections which are at odds with an idealized version of motherhood,’ she says. ‘Shit Mom is not the virgin mother, nor the Queen Mother, but an embodiment of contamination, which is what the experience of raising a new generation is like.’

Madani’s paintings and animations are immediately recognizable; they stage domestic intimacy in grotesque, verging-on-childlike compositions, which are also playful and tender. The characters seem to be wrestling with the paint as well as their fate. ‘It is not just mothering that is a hard to take,’ Madani says, ‘but also the suffocating culture around mothering.’ In an almost farcical way, she carves out space for a new canon.

Mirthe Berentsen is a writer, artist, and policymaker based in Berlin and Amsterdam. She is currently working on a book and podcast on the politicization of motherhood and art with the Dutch publisher Das Mag.

Tala Madani's animated paintings will be screened in the frame of Art Basel's Film program, curated by Filipa Ramos. The event will take place on Thursday, June 16 at 7pm at Stadtkino Basel. Find out more here.

Madani is represented by Pilar Corrias, London; 303 Gallery, New York City; and David Kordansky Gallery, New York City and Los Angeles.

Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Tala Madani, Shit Mom (Hammock), 2021. Courtesy of the Artist and Pilar Corrias, London. 2. Tala Madani, The Womb (video animation still), 2019. Courtesy of the Artist and Pilar Corrias, London. 3. Tala Madani, Fan Hang, 2021. 

Caption for video extracts: Tala Madani, Manual Man, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.