Tai Shani’s phantasmagoric, multi-layered art spans film, performance, text, sculpture and installation. Drawing on references ranging from feminist science fiction, post-modern architecture, psychoanalysis and popular culture, she reimagines histories and mythologies to reclaim forgotten female narratives and explore speculative realities that challenge current patriarchal structures. Her installations often emerge from, and contain, her own writing. For British Art Show 9, Shani presents a new instalment of The Neon Hieroglyph (2021), which she describes as a ‘mausoleum for psychedelic witches, a house for ghosts where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide’. This experiential work stems from Shani’s research into ergot, a fungus that grows on various grains, from which LSD is derived.
Tai Shani (born 1976, London) lives and works in London. Shani is self-taught.
Tai Shani, Psy Chi Anem One, 2019. Installation view: Fondazione Re Rebaudengo, Turin © the artist. Courtesy the artist