Tai Shani British, b. 1978

Tai 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, by extending into divergent formats and collaborations, fragmentary cosmologies of nonsovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of marginalisation 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. Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-) structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present. In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, shapes the framework of Shani’s artistic practice. Clusters of work like DC Productions or Neon Hieroglyph take mythical and historical narratives – such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women, or cases of psychedelic ergot poisoning causing social unrest – as a template and retell them, over time, through a range of practices, from watercolours and sculptures to animation in theatrical performance. Collected texts were published in Our Fatal Magic (2019) and The Neon Hieroglyph (2023). Tai Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. Her work has been shown extensively in Britain and internationally.