There is an overwhelming sense of sadness and hope in the images Tal Badani has orchestrated. Here is a world which simultaneously nurtures and destroys life, a world which both creates wholeness and blasts bodies and psyches into fragments. A yearning for reconnection is threaded throughout, a yearning to return to an earlier wholeness, to a love which resonates with the warmth and safety of a woman's womb.
The fetus, the electronic screen, tears, nails, lips, articles of clothing, shattered glass, x-rays, water, shrouds, and of course figures, dressed and naked, animate and still, mostly female, are the recurring motifs which are used to explore the “fragility of life” in Badani’s words. These physical elements, some naturally occurring, some constructs of modern technology, including of course the ability to ‘see’ the unborn child in utero, are able to either connect disparate materials or create distance between them. A nail joins two pieces of wood and can mortally pierce a human heart. Lips bring two people together in a kiss, a promise of intimacy and love. Lips allow words to form, the mouth, the composite of breath and spirit, and these words can be compassionate and they can be poisonous. And a white plastic shroud is both reminiscent of respectful ancient burials and a contemporary statement on the ecological disaster of long-living nylon bags, the waste of human lives.
Of all the images, the ‘screen womb’ demands our greatest attention. In its simplicity – it is the frame in which the fetus floats, it is being hugged and held by women as an extension of their bodies, the unconscious projection of thoughts when it appears by their heads – lies its complexity. For though the electronic screen has become a staple of modern consciousness, we are still in the embryonic stage of our relationship to it. Yes, televisions are a fixture in most people’s lives. And yes, as part of the practice of medicine, they literally help physicians save lives. The electronic screen enables us to see what was off limits before, it has created an entire world of global communication, yet it also inhibits us by relying on virtual worlds, augmenting our inherent sense of alienation both from ourselves and from one another. 
Disembodiment or alienation is a theme of the entire series. There is a fracturing of body parts – lips, tears, fetuses removed from the natural environment of the womb and thrust into the electronic bath of the blue screen. A naked woman cradles a screen womb and lips float around her. In another image perpendicular lips resembling a reed or a tree leaf collide with a woman’s nipple. A topsy turvy world where ethereal lips cannot drink from the promising breast. And look, in another image hands in a prayer position are poised to catch the floating lips, while in a companion piece the lips are cradled, composed like fallen leaves of a tree, or like pieces of an unresolved jigsaw puzzle. Stenciled tears hover above bodies and gently closed eyes.The recurring combination of alienation – the intrusion of the screen, echoes of a mass media’s exploitation of primal sensory experience – but also of care, hugging, holding, hands as safety nets, the need and ability of women to nurture despite the disjointedness is returned to over and over.
Badani says that since we begin our lives in a womb, we “carry a passport of this place that we can’t remember we have seen.” But what remains of this experience is the memory of warmth, of safety, and the longing to recapture this experience, drives our emotional lives.
There is a series of reclining women interacting with an animated yet empty man’s jacket. The unfulfilled promise, a version of the presence of absence Derrida referred to. Fulfillment, companionship, intimacy, communication, here bankrupt. The empty jacket, like the fetus in the television screen, reveals the hardened outer shells, the kelipot, of the human being. They are what cover the human soul, according to the sixteenth century Kabbalist Isaac Luria. Here is longing, here is a sustained hope; here there is also illusion. A woman holds a handless sleeve to her breast – a gesture of sexual and maternal longing.
The short white satin nightgown is a counterpoint to the long black one which drapes other women. In some photos, the nightgown is both animated yet empty like the male jacket. A symbol of alienation, but this time not from another, but from one’s self. For this nightgown is a metonym for what is not being realized in the woman. The nightgown floats above her like a spirit summoned in a dream asking to be filled. And sometimes the nightgown floats alone like a lotus in a filled bath, a channel of water leading to the womb. Here is color in a dreamscape, a sensuous reminder of the convergence of spirit and matter, of creation and procreation. 

Transparent fabric wraps a naked female body. A mummy draped in her death shroud. At the same time though, the crinkly whiteness of her covering resembles a chrysalis, a living creature in a cocoon waiting to emerge. Badani continues to mix images of death and life, exploiting the idea that the cyclical nature there is movement and meaning. When a baby is born, a woman is transformed into a new shape, that of mother. Is it coincidental he asks that in British English mothers are called mummies? "Life creates future deaths," he explains. And death foments new life. In a Pieta pose, a man and a woman with naked torsos are posed together. The woman has become the Madonna, the long suffering mother acutely aware of failed potential, both in body and spirit. Her male child is draped over her legs. He too is inanimate. He too embodies the presence of absence. The world which births carries with it always the seeds of death. 
In many images, disembodied and almost cartoon-like tears hover over the figures. The stenciled silhouette of the fetus points to them on the face of a woman lying naked in a bathtub. Its outstretched finger is of course a glossing of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel image of God creating Adam. But Badani's image, because of contemporary visual language, has a great affinity with Spielberg's E.T. I am referring to the scene at the movie's end when E.T.'s finger stretches out to touch the tip of the child's. This is a deliberate reference to Michelangelo as well. What unites all three images is that the pointing finger embodies a desire to generate connection, to produce a point of contact where creativity and the life force are activated. 
Whether they fall like rain onto a nightgown or constitute the foreground on faces, these tears are a subtext of sadness. Yet this is a sadness, which is not without reason and not without hope. For tears resonate with the waters of the beginning, and of the ongoing processes of life.