Madani's silent, stop-motion animation videos, which consist of over two thousand painted images per minute, are contemporary parables illustrating a repertoire of weakness and vice. The male protagonists in her works are both tragic and comical—primitive beings propelled by hubris and ignorance, rendered amorphously through a thick application of paint. By placing these figures in situations where they are subject to humiliation or violence, Madani performs a critique of patriarchal structures of power, fundamentalism, and sexism.
Chit Chat depicts a flurry of fruitless dealings among an anonymous group of men. Formless and easily malleable, it is difficult to decipher where one figure ends and another begins. As their futile exchanges grow increasingly violent, the work's innocuous title takes on a more sinister connotation as a euphemism for conflict, brutality, and war.
Gallery label from 2017.