Fall Open House: Tala Madani, Ali Subotnick, and Rebecca Lowery in Conversation

Saturday, September 10, 2022
Conversation between artists Tala Madani, Ali Subotnick, Guest Curator, and Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator.

Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran, lives and works in Los Angeles) makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflections on gender, particularly masculine and feminine stereotypes, idealistic notions of childhood and family, as well as political authority and questions of who and what gets represented in the art historical canon. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, revealing a complex vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her work is held in the collections of major museums worldwide and has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including recent solo exhibitions at KM21, The Hague, Netherlands (2022); Start Museum, Shanghai (2020); Southbank Centre, London (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); and Secession, Vienna (2019). Madani earned a BFA from Oregon State University in 2004 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006. She was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize in 2020.

Ali Subotnick is an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles. She organized the exhibitions UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991 – 2015 (2015), The Afghan Carpet Project (2015), Mark Leckey: On Pleasure Bent (2013), LLYN FOULKES (2013), and Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. (2009), among others, over her ten-year tenure as curator at the the Hammer Museum. She organized the first and only Venice Beach Biennial, a weekend exhibition/event on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, which was a collateral event to Made in L.A. 2012 (which she co-curated). Subotnick also curated over twenty solo Hammer Projects exhibitions, many of them debut American institutional exhibitions for the artists. In 2019, she curated the Frieze Projects for the inaugural Frieze Los Angeles. In 2006, along with her frequent collaborators, artist Maurizio Cattelan and curator Massimiliano Gioni (together they created The Wrong Gallery & Charley magazine), she co-curated Of Mice and Men, the 4th Berlin Biennial for contemporary art. Subotnick is currently adjunct curator for the Hammer Museum and curator-at-large for Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND).

Rebecca Lowery is Associate Curator at MOCA. In addition to her work overseeing the permanent collection, she has most recently organized the exhibitions Evidence: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2020) and Making Space: Recent Photography Acquisitions (2020). Lowery has also co-organized numerous exhibitions at MOCA including Cameron Rowland: D37 (2018) and The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection (2019). Previously a Museum Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, she has contributed scholarship to publications for exhibitions such as One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North, Picasso Sculpture, and Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends. Lowery received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a dissertation exploring performance art in 1970s Los Angeles. Recent publications include contributions to With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972—1985 (2019) and Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art (2016).

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