Some exhibits grow on one. Others inviegle revisiting by sheer puzzlement. Such are the exhibits at the Saatchi and Tate Modern. The Saatchi, you will remember, is hosting a series of 3-month exhibitions on particular themes. Running until early May is “Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East.” It is not a screaming revolutionary art show. But it is revolutionary.
You will remember the women’s “shrouds” that contain an iron or a broom or a pair of rubber dish-washing gloves rather than faces. Shadi Ghadirian complements these images with those of women in royal clothes and royal apartments pushing a vacuum clearner of listening to a boom box. The image of “royal woman” is objectified in the Kantian sense into an instrument.
Equally interesting are a set of drawings done by Tala Madani. These are of imaginary secret men’s meetings. There is one called “Ice Cream” which caricatures a men’s meeting by filling it with streams of pink and brown paint. We are told that the strawbery-chocolate colours of Neapolitan gelato conjur a Mafioso affiliation, “its sickly sweet gore transforming [a] blood bath to festive delight.”
Another, called “Holy Light” pictures another secret men’s meeting, this time with a “golden shower” pouring over them. According to the notes, “Madani renders this scene with minimal detail, the painting’s crude content becoming a loaded approach to formalism.” Perhaps the word is “unloaded”?
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