Tai Shani Talk

About

Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts.

These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures to theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and effect, and the epic in relation to post-patriarchal realism.

Shani's ongoing feminist project ‘Dark Continent Productions’ is an expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering proto-feminist book, ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’.

It is a city simultaneously internal and geographic, past and future, part ruin, part becoming, a city in time but not in space, within it history is reconstructed to privilege sensation and interiority.

It is a city outside of hierarchy whose mythologies conceptualise the ‘epic’ as a form to test the potentials of feminist politics and ideologies, a platform to imagine a post-patriarchal world.

Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015), Southbank Centre, London (2014-15), Arnolfini, Bristol (2013), Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011).