Daughter BWASM review

filthy pot shots from a bad mum and her AI offspring

Pilar Corrias, London

The Iranian-born US artist cleverly uses AI-generated robot children to show she has had enough of women being treated like mechanical automatons for childbirth and care

Childish and confrontational … Tala Madani’s DWASM (Teddy). Photograph: Fredrik Nilsen Studio/Tala Madani; courtesy the artist,The Guardian and Pilar Corrias, London.

by Eddy Frankel, The Guardian

What’s the opposite of perfect? Well, shit, according to Tala Madani. For years now the Iranian-born US artist has been painting Shit Mom, a fetid smear of a human figure intended as a subversion of feminine, maternal ideals. And in the painter’s latest show, Shit Mom has a new child in her care: she has adopted an AI daughter.

The rub is immediately obvious: the AI robot represents perfection; Shit Mom its impossibility. As they interact across the canvases, the gleaming mechanical perfection of the daughter – born motherless, hence the show’s title “Daughter BWASM”, or Born Without a Shit Mom – gets streaked with smudges of filthy brown. The more the mum cares for her daughter, the more she taints her. The robot can’t avoid getting moulded in her mother’s image.

The show is one of the first instances of AI being used as both tool and subject in a big London gallery. Madani treats AI like a component of modern society that has to be dealt with, accepted and adapted, rather than just some fancy new toy to gawp at and play with.

Soft Edge of the Blade Vol. 3

After acclaimed editions in London (Frieze No.9 Cork Street, 2022) and Toronto (Zaal Art Gallery, 2023), “Soft Edge of the Blade” arrives in Dubai for its third and most ambitious chapter. The exhibition gathers artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, and hybrid media to examine violence in its many forms—visible and invisible, personal and collective.

Mehrdad Mohebali, Untitled, 2025, Acrylic on canvas. 130 x 331 cm. Courtesy the artist, Leila Heller Gallery and Dreamideamachine Art View.

by Efi Michalarou, Dreamideamachine Art View

The exhibition “Soft Edge of the Blade Vol. 3” expands beyond the familiar narratives of war and political oppression to address subtler forms of “soft” violence: migration, diaspora, patriarchy, family structures, gender, censorship, and the weaponization of language in digital spaces. By situating these inquiries within the Middle East, the exhibition highlights how history, tradition, and memory can themselves carry traces of violence.

Audiences are invited to engage with works that oscillate between the symbolic and the visceral, asking not only how violence manifests but whether we recognize it at all. In the words of Elie Wiesel, whose reflection guides the project: “Questions unite people. It is the answers that divide them.”

From London to Toronto, “Soft Edge of the Blade” has traced the contours of violence across continents. Now, in Dubai, the series unfolds its most expansive act yet. Here, in a region whose very name—“the Middle East”—is entangled with a vocabulary of conflict, the exhibition turns inward. It asks: what if the violence we dread is already within us, hidden in memory, ornament, tradition, even beauty?

The artists assembled speak in many tongues—painting, sculpture, photography, hybrid media—yet their voices converge on a single question: how does violence seep softly into our lives? Their works move between intimacy and rupture, between the symbolic and the visceral, touching on censorship, domesticity, resistance, and the fragile architectures of identity.

Translating Toward Possibility:

Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

by The Common

Friends for over a decade, MARIAM RAHMANI and SARAH FAUX have been connecting for years about their respective artistic practices. They recently spoke over Zoom for The Common: Sarah from her painting studio, and Mariam from her office in Vermont. In the following conversation, they discuss Mariam’s novel, Liquid, published earlier this year, which centers a queer Muslim woman who navigates 100 dates in one summer. They speak on how translating others’ work has served Mariam’s own voice in writing, and how messiness and uncertainty are at the heart of good literature.

Sarah Faux (SF): It’s very special to get this opportunity to interview you after you interviewed me at my painting exhibition in April! We had the unique opportunity to release two projects simultaneously, and now we are about six months post-release of your excellent novel, Liquid. I’m curious how you’re feeling a few months later?

Mariam Rahmani (MR): It’s actually a relief that I’m not thinking about it that much anymore. I had a really busy summer. I had to turn in another translation, a full book manuscript. I also got back to an old book I had buried, and researched a new book I started two years ago, soon after Liquid got acquired. It’s kind of nice, because my mind is occupied with new questions. And now this novel exists in the world and has a life of its own. I think that the beauty of the relationship between an author and a reader is the fact that they will never meet and never speak to each other, and really never know of each other outside of that work.

SF: Well, except for us right now. But I get that, and also at the same time, do you feel like your book might be filling a void that you observed in literary fiction? Is Liquid directed towards a specific reader that might otherwise be neglected?

“Beginnings”

The late Iranian American artist’s exhibition exemplified how he expanded the Eurocentric parameters of abstraction.

Installation view of MANOUCHER YEKTAI’s “Beginnings” at Karma Gallery, Los Angeles, 2025. Courtesy Karma Gallery and ArtAsiaPacific.

by Liz Hirsch, ArtAsiaPacific

“Beginnings,” curated by writer and editor Negar Azimi, was the most comprehensive survey to date of early works by Manoucher Yektai (1921–2019), an artist who belonged to the New York School yet never quite fit its mythology of white male heroism. The Iranian-born painter trained in Tehran, New York, and Paris before settling in New York by 1948, bringing a sensibility shaped by multiple European modernisms (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism) alongside his native cultural heritage. Unfolding chronologically across two large rooms, the exhibition featured paintings made between 1948 and 1969 that exemplify how Yektai transformed Surrealist biomorphism into a muscular material language. What emerged was the story of an artist expanding the Eurocentric parameters of abstraction in the US. 

Untitled (1948), with whites and blues punctuated by sienna, greeted visitors near the entrance. The curving forms depicted in this work are edged with tooth-like projections. Though the white patches appear smooth at first, a closer look reveals a textured, striated surface, recalling a fine comb that has passed through wet plaster. Hung nearby was Untitled (1949), a smaller, kite-shaped tableau with compressed swirls of purple, orange, and black, reminiscent of intricately patterned Persian carpets as well as the fluid, amoeba-like imagery of Joan Miró and Jean Arp. Two decades before American artists like Ellsworth Kelly or Frank Stella produced their atypically shaped canvases, Yektai treated the edge as a charged, sculptural boundary.

Noble/Savage

Ali Banisadr’s Mesmerizing Paintings Make Sense of Chaos 

Ali Banisadr, installation view of “Noble/Savage” at Olney Gleason, 2025. Photo by Charlie Rubin. Courtesy of Olney Gleason and Artsy.

by Maxwell Rabb, Artsy

Ali Banisadr’s childhood in Tehran was marked by violence. At the start of the Iran-Iraq War, which broke out in 1980, he was only four years old. “As a child, I was trying to understand this chaos,” he told me during a recent visit to his studio in Brooklyn. “The most abstract thing to make sense of for me was living in Iran during the war.”

That sensory overload became the foundation of his visual language, informed in large part by the artist’s synesthesia. Making art, he told me, was a way to impose order on disorder—to “make sense out of the sounds,” he explained. Four decades later, Banisadr, now 49, lives in New York, where he continues to try to understand the world through his hyperactive compositions. Layers of rough, energetic brushstrokes collide with flashes of color that hum against each other, evoking a similar dissonance to what he experienced as a child. His canvases are visually overwhelming yet remain governed by some internal logic, like a piece of music.

This push-pull relationship between order and chaos lies at the center of “Noble/Savage,” Banisadr’s solo show inaugurating New York’s Olney Gleason gallery (previously known as Kasmin). The show brings together the Iranian American artist’s newest paintings and a suite of bronze sculptures, his first in this medium. This body of work extends Banisadr’s lifelong pursuit of making sense of confusing, often contradictory human experiences.

In 1988, his family relocated from Tehran to San Francisco, where he started making graffiti among a community of artists. There, he was inspired by other artists using the medium to create sociopolitical critique. For example, in our interview, Banisadr name-checked Barry McGee, who “was making commentary about things that you were seeing in San Francisco,” referring to the gentrification of the city over the years.

nameless

Nairy Baghramian at WIELS — nameless brings together several previously unseen bodies of work in dialogue with the post-industrial architecture.

Installation view, photography by Eline Willaert. Courtesy SLEEK.

by Nisha Merit, SLEEK

Iranian-born, Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian has spent decades forging a singular sculptural vocabulary that draws from dance, theatre, fashion, architecture and the history of sculpture itself. Since 1984 she has lived and worked in Berlin, developing a practice that moves across sculpture, spatial installation, photography, and drawing.

Her exhibition nameless, which opened last Saturday at WIELS in Brussels, examines the forces that shape the displacement and statelessness of objects. Baghramian reflects on the precarious condition of works that exist perpetually “in between” – liberated from fixed classifications or limiting environments. She conjures an urgency for a sculptural mode of existence outside the rigidity of language, codes, and names – a concern that resonates well beyond today’s geopolitical crises. For Baghramian, sculpture is not simply an object but an expanded way of understanding the world.