Tala Madani’s ‘Shit Mom’ Sets Foot into the Future

For those already familiar with Tala Madani’s recurring character Shit Mom, a new show at Pilar Corrias in London, ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M’, feels like the next instalment in an ongoing saga. Across two floors, paintings and occasional video works update us on Shit Mom’s adventures in a new world of technofeudalism and advanced AI: synthetic life forms that are born, as the show’s title suggests, without a ‘shit’ (read: organic) mother.

Greeting us, however, are two of the four works in the show not to contain a humanoid subject: a sculpture and a painting hung on a nearby wall, both titled Daughter Born Without a Mother (Adopted) (all works 2025). Despite what their names suggest, both depict part of a steam engine mechanism smeared with teal-green paint. It is, I believe, a declaration of Madani’s intent to pursue technological and work-based themes, and perhaps to continue an art-making tradition that always took specific aim at the more idiotic results of mechanical production. These two works feel like nods to the hare-brained contraptions of Jean Tinguely, for example, or even Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine (1922).

After this, and navigating the show clockwise, we are treated to some of the more classic Shit Mom fare: the paintings Shit Mom Ascending a Staircase (Residue) and Shit Mom Ascending a Staircase (Squares), which depict that blobby, faecal creature as she gracefully smears herself along the walls of an immaculate condo or modernist villa.  

A short, animated film, in a side room, Shit Mom Learning How to Walk, shows the protagonist mimicking the footwork of women from Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies of the 1880s as they walk, pirouette and curtsey. In her attempts to learn the nuances of commercial femininity, Shit Mom’s spasmodic, unsteady movements evoke those of a newborn lamb recently expelled from its mother’s womb, or an alien creature just fallen from the sky – or, indeed, a great pile of human shit newly imparted with consciousness.

As a counter to the aestheticization of the Western art tradition – its desire to perfect, refine and commodify everything in its wake, not least women – Shit Mom has rightly won fans, among them the writer Maggie Nelson, who describes the satirical construct as ‘almost holy’. ‘The paintings themselves are the holding containers for whatever rage, anguish, curiosity, fear or sorrow might pass through us, from infancy through adulthood,’ she writes in her 2024 essay collection Like Love – the ‘us’ being women; the rage being endemic.

It would seem only natural, then, to insert Shit Mom into that virtual terrain which forms the latest frontier of misogyny and assault on women’s dignity. Sidling up alongside Madani’s new orphan figures – the Daughters B.W.A.S.M – Shit Mom’s soft, yielding form creates a longing in us for the more chaotic (and erotic) world that is rapidly being replaced by supercharged digital reproduction. The painting D.B.W.A.S.M (Umbilical Discord) captures this poignantly in its portrayal of Shit Mom seeming to supply a bionic woman with nourishment via her umbilical cord.

But something is off. Despite their critique, Madani’s slick paintings still seem optimized for the market, while the figures they contain reproduce outdated, anthropomorphic depictions of technology akin to those seen in films such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) – with the result that they still feel slightly titillating and pornographic. One wonders if the ultimate fate of these objects will be to adorn the hallways and homes of the very institutions and people that they would seem to resist. Matt cartoons for the super-rich, perhaps, offering a moment’s light relief and self-aware irony in the midst of so much horror and so much shame.  

Tala Madani’s ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M’ is at Pilar Corrias, London, until 17 January 

_{Main image: Tala Madani, D.B.W.A.S.M (Teddy), 2025, oil and screen print on synthetic polymer, 60 × 40 cm. Courtesy: © the artist and Pilar Corrias, London}