Artist, Tala Madani: The five animations on view here are some of my first animations.
Whatever I do is from the language of drawing and painting: painted backgrounds, painted characters. Stop motion animation, where you are painting something, and photographing it scene-by-scene allows you to stay with that same idea for a very long duration. I was also able to include a kind of a narrative that doesn't work well with painting.
With these sets of animations, they're dealing with power dynamics. So, Underman, I thought about a character that all these things happen to him. There are basically the up guys and the low guys, and the up guys just start throwing things on the low guy. I think the subject for me is about power, under-over, who does what to who, what kind of structural violence we inhabit.
I also wanted to think about transformation, but that transformation seems to always take on a grotesquery or a force. For instance, Chit Chat is two figures talking and I thought the gesture of their speech looked like they were almost biting and eating, and so the third person who was between them is actually getting chewed up. So I thought, they will be so sad they just ate their friend, they'll try to get him back and have to regurgitate him. The violence in my work happens as a “oops” situation. They're chit chatting and “oops,” they ate the guy.
And I personally use humor as a way of deflecting from difficult things. It offers a safe place for myself and the audience to sit with an idea, so that we can all play and question together.