Tala Madani: BWASM Daughter Review – Dirty Footage of a Bad Mom and Her AI Offspring | Art and design

WHat the opposite of perfect? Well, damn it, according to Tala Madani. For many years, the Iranian-born American artist has been painting “Shit Mom,” a fetid smears of a human figure meant to subvert feminine and maternal ideals. And in the illustrator’s latest offering, Shit Mom has a new baby in her care: she’s adopted an AI daughter.

The problem becomes immediately clear: the AI ​​robot represents perfection; Damn it, mom, this is impossible. As they interact across the panels, the gleaming mechanical perfection of the daughter — born without a mother, hence the show’s title, “Bosem’s Daughter,” or Born Without a Mother — is punctuated by smears of dirty brown. The more a mother cares for her daughter, the more she pollutes her. The robot cannot avoid being shaped like her mother.

The show is one of the first examples of AI being used as a tool and The subject of a major exhibition in London. Madani treats AI as a component of modern society that must be engaged with, accepted, and adapted, not just a fancy new toy to look at and play with.

They are paintings with a unique look: ultra-resolution screen prints of AI-generated robots painted with loose brown marks. They are both shiny and shiny, and boring and disgusting. In one, the two sleek pink and orange robots appear to have large, dark brown bumps. In another scene, Shit Mom kneels in front of her huge mechanical baby, desperately trying to clean it but only succeeding in smearing it with feces. The whole thing looks like screenshots from I, Robot, or Ex Machina, smeared with skid marks.

It is a completely civil style. She makes big, intelligent points in a deliberately childish and confrontational way. I don’t think these are meant to be pretty, decorative pictures. They are funny and satirical takedowns of societal norms.

While Shit Mom has previously been used to talk about concerns related to motherhood, here the character instead deals with technological concerns and broader sexism. Why do we call machines “they”? Why are all the robots in cinema hot babes? Madani traces much of it back to early modernists such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. A 1916 painting of a mechanical wheel by Picabia titled Daughter Born Without a Mother (and clearly covered in filth) is evoked here, while nods to Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase recur throughout the show. Culture and history have always treated women as machines, automated mechanical machines of childbirth and care, and Madani has had enough.

There are two animated films on similar themes. In one, Madani inserts Shit Mom into experimental vignettes of naked women walking near Eadweard Muybridge, sullying all the objective perfection of this early cinematic experiment. In the other, she makes my mother climb endless stairs. But I don’t find the films all that interesting, the AI ​​theme is a bit too extended throughout the entire show.

But with every work here, the artist rejects, mocks and despises conventions and expectations. It’s vulgar humor as rebellion, and excrement as fuck you. It is funny, clever, aggressive, subversive, and satirical art. Not shit at all, really.