Tai Shani

Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London. She is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. In 2019 Shani was a Max Mara prize nominee. Shani’s most recent solo exhibitions include The World to Me Was A Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent at The Cosmic House, UK and Lavish Phantoms of the House of Dust at Gio Marconi, Milan, Italy. In 2023, Shani was the subject of solo exhibitions at KM21, The Hague, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Her work has been shown at British Art Show 09, Touring (2021), CentroCentro, Madrid (2019–20), Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunst Verein, Austria (2019); Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2019); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy (2019); Glasgow International, UK (2018); Tensta Konsthall, Sweden (2017), Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2017); Serpentine Galleries, UK (2016); Tate, UK (2016); and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland (2016).

Shani’s artistic practice, comprising performance, film, photography, and installation, uses experimental writing as a guiding method. Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Shani’s texts attempt to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate, fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised non-sovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labour, illness and solidarity, her work is invested in recovering feminised aesthetic modes – such as the floral, the trippy or the gothic – in a register of utopian militancy. In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, often shapes Shani’s approach: Her long-term projects work through historical and mythical narratives, such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women or the social history of psychedelic ergot poisoning. Extending into divergent formats and collaborations. Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present.

© Tai Shani. Photo: Soliloquy (Images Doc).