ART:PRESENTATION:Tai Shani Tragodía

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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Grazer Kunstverein Archive

In Tai Shani’s “Tragodía” death holds everything together. In the form of a virtual reality play accompanied by an exquisite sculptural installation, Tai Shani creates a speculative portal, lingering in the unknown space between life and death, where kinship, intimacy, love and the wholeness of being can be contemplated in extreme close-up. The play tells the story of the tragic death of an only-child. In passing they are leaving behind their close-knit kin: grandmother, aunt, mother, and Oedipuss the cat, all of whom are shaken with the violence of grief and love. Through the narrative device of virtual reality, we experience the play from the inner perspective of the dying child, floating in a dream realm somewhere between our own physical body, their post-human entity, and the metaphysical beyond. Simultaneously, as breathing bodies in the material world, we are surrounded by a sacred lilac landscape of artefacts in the gallery; death masks, amulets, relics, talismans, bones, hair, and crystals. This circuit board of connections, or ancient archaeological ruin becomes a burial site for the deceased child and their loved ones, striving to hold together in tangible concrete reality, all possible futures and all possible pasts. Since 2014, Tai Shanihas constructed hallucinatory environments inhabited by feminine characters adapted from myth, history, and science fiction. Tai Shani has been nominated for the 2019 Turner Prize  for her participation in Glasgow International 2018, solo exhibition “DC: Semiramis” at The Tetley, Leeds and participation in “Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance” at Nottingham Contemporary and the De Le Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. These exhibitions centre 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. At Glasgow International and Nottingham Contemporary the striking sculptural set was activated over a number of days with performances, each focusing on a different character from the series. At The Tetley, the work took the form of installations comprising an immersive set alongside a complete archive of the “Dark Continent project”, including video documentation of all twelve performances, texts, posters and a radio play.

Info: Grazer Kunstverein, Palais Trauttmansdorff, Burggasse 4, Graz, Duration: 27/5-4/9/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.grazerkunstverein.org