Tai Shani’s practice encompasses performance, film, photography and sculptural installations, frequently structured around experimental texts. Taking inspiration from disparate histories, narratives and characters mined from forgotten sources, Shani creates dark, fantastical worlds, brimming with utopian potential. These deeply affective works often combine rich and complex monologues with arresting, saturated installations, manifesting equally disturbing and divine images in the mind of the viewer.

Tai Shani’s recent exhibitions at Glasgow International (2018), The Tetley, Leeds (2018) and participation in Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary (2019) and the De Le Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, (2019) were centred around Shani’s on-going project Dark Continent, developed by the artist over a four-year period. The work is made up of multiple characters which explore mythical and real women in an expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 pioneering proto-feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies. Shani uses the structure of an allegorical city of women to explore ‘feminine’ subjectivity and experience, through a gothic/science-fiction lens. Adopting Pizans’ medieval conception of history, where historical events, fictions and myths are entwined, Dark Continent draws upon a host of references, tropes and characters from disparate sources, creating an elaborate world, outside of time and beyond patriarchal limits.

Shani has recently exhibited her work at Temple Bar, Dublin (2019-20); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2019); CentroCentro, Madrid (2019); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2019); The Tetley, Leeds (2018), Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2018), Tramway, Glasgow (2018); Athens Biennale, Athens (2018); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2017); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate Britain, London (2016). 

Shani is one of the four awarded artists of the Turner Prize 2019: the artists requested for the prize to be shared as a symbol of solidarity at a time of global political crisis. 

Shani will be exhibiting newly commissioned work in The British Art Show 9, 2021-2022 and Manchester International Festival, 2021.

DC: Semiramis

DC: Semiramis presented at the Turner Contemporary for the Turner Prize in 2019 brings together the full roster of these 12 characters, to create an epic tableaux vivant. These often violent, erotic and fantastical narratives mix science-fiction, anthropology, feminist and queer theory, to reimagine a world with interlinked cosmologies, myth and histories. The physical installation is akin to stepping through a portal. A giant, disembodied green hand emerges from a red velvet sleeve on to the floor, palm upwards as though to beckon you in; above it rises a futuristic cityscape, with supple pink columns supporting a structure of bulbous pink bowels and phallic shapes. At once oddly comforting and utterly alien, the immersive installation is a realisation of the stage for DC: Semiramis (2019), the sequence of 12 monologues. DC: Semiramis (2019), privileges sensation, experience and interiority, and undermines patriarchal conceptions of narrative history to propose a possible post-patriarchal future.

Tragodía, 2019

GRANDMOTHER

Mercury, Mercury, Mars, Venus.

AUNT

Air, Air, Fire, Earth.

MOTHER

Sweet child of mine refusing to fatten up
Sweet child of mine unbearably still
Sweet child of mine all matter in earth
Baby Osiris.
Absorbed and metabolised into the leaves that reach into the white light of the sun.

The public day, a spray spat out in laughter
A goo, dribbled out from a corner lip in paralysis
An elixir swirled in in the warm capacity of safety
In the private day, I had promised that today, we would play and I would not let boredom find you, pierced organs divvied up in those carved gilded canopic jars.

Tragodía is a mesmerising and affecting virtual reality play, and atmospherically saturated sculptural installation. Though experienced independently, these two parts coalesce into a nebulous transcendent narrative that converses between life and death, the physical and intangible, trauma and reconciliation.

The experimental narrative is fragmentary, enacted by multiple voices and, through the virtual reality experience, the viewer embodies the avatar of the Ghost Child. Their first-hand perspective of the unfolding events and associated memories are spoken internally and the Ghost Child communicates with their loved ones from the cast of the Mother, the Aunt, Grandmother Eve, and Oedipuss the Cat. Descriptions of pierced organs, car doors, metal railings, and engine acceleration, bring forth a scenario in which Ghost Child is being called back to life from the brink of death following a terrible accident. Incantations and spells are performed by the elder characters in order to transmit between layers of reality. By reliving their shared memories of Ghost Child, including burying puppies in the back garden or taking acid in a forest, a feeling of temporary consolation takes over. The narrative continues along a desolate trajectory but is ultimately resolved in a beautiful epiphany of acceptance and love.

The play is set in an infinite celestial expanse, in which the heads of the familial characters orbit as colossal globes above, beside and beneath Ghost Child in intense close-up. Their enormous eyes and mouths are close to engulfing the visual landscape but remain beyond physical reach. The switch of scale when summoned back into the material installation in the gallery recasts the viewer as a looming deity above an expansive sculptural platform. As a topographical representation of a utopian archaeological site, the sculpture potentially exists at any point in the future or ancient past but not connected to a specific place or known civilisation. The pyramids, altars and ley line reliefs rise from the platform’s surface, bringing to mind real-world places of contact between life and death, as well as supernatural and technological forms of communication and discovery. The hand-worked sculptures situated on this platform share this mystical symbolism, with protective amulets laid on the eyes and chest of the ‘mummified’ Grandmother figure, and coiled snakes, cosmic eggs and crystal balls. 3D-printed ‘death masks’ of the play’s characters also echo the will to preserve life after death.

Outsides & Erotics, 2020

In Outsides & Erotics (2020) architectural structures in pastel shades, complete with crenellations and blocks of stairs leading mysteriously out of view, border each scene. Their luminous backgrounds glow like a nuclear sky, providing an atmospheric tension for the surreal combination at the paintings centres: hovering loops of interconnected bubbles that threaten to pop at any moment, their sugary peaches and reds glinting like boiled sweets. The shapes they make are imitated by the tight and extravagant curves of another loop, one that whips across the surface of the page like a gymnast’s ribbon. These objects friendly coexistence—a snapshot of motion—is topped by opaque discs or holes, the watercolour and gouache offering an endless playfulness between depth and flatness, each shape on the verge of transformation.

Showings, 2018

“These are models for a structured, tragic play about my family.
These are sites for myth making and the collapse of myth into prosaic materials both natural and synthetic.
These are her bodily remains.
These are cryptic; they are spell books, to be read literally but with profound belief.
These are maquettes for never closing, hedonistic nightclubs, where we can lose our minds.
These are a symbolic portrait of a time-travelling mystic. These are an aerial drone view of archaeological sites of unknown civilisations, from the very far past of the very far future.
These are dwellings for my cat Oedipuss.
These are a faery corpse.
These are a medieval vision of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.
These are airports for extra-terrestrials my parent’s sibling said when they saw them.
These are portraits for ghosts to come into our world, they can be summoned here.”

Unique work of 3 table top installations, each 90cm x 61cm

Wood, Epoxy resin, Plaster, Jesmonite, Glass, Epoxy resin putty, Red jasper, Red agate, Red aventurine, Green aventurine, Lapis lazuli, Clear quartz, Amethyst, Brass, Silver, Aluminium, Steel, Plastic, Epoxy clay, Acorn (real), Paper, Ladybird (real)

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