Tala Madani’s work is a form of cultural criticism inflected with a peevish sense of humour and brings to bear basic human feelings and emotions, such as anxiety, anger, fear, isolation, paranoia, envy and lust.

Part of Madani’s celebrated ‘Shit Mom’ series, Alpha Mother is an antidote to the cultural messaging that women have been given for centuries. Simultaneously an iconoclast and a new icon; a new language and the making of a contemporary figure. For the artist, the figure of the ‘Shit Mom’ represents freedom and the rejection of idealism, sitting alongside Madani’s previous work that has always been about creating a space of “allowing”, being free and pushing against sentimentality.

Alpha Mother is about the ideas of acceptance and release of anxieties around the expectations of idealism. Madani’s works cast doubt over idealism’s merits and promises and how prescriptive these can be. A welcome respite, the figure in Alpha Mother rejects the conventionally aspirational in favour of the “less than ideal” as a way forward — as a way of reaching something better.