Tai Shani

Tai Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising installation, performance, film, and photography, revolves around experimental texts to explore the excess and the affects of the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism.

Tai Shani's project ‘DC Productions’ (2014-2019) proposed an allegorical city of women. An experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies – within which Christine builds a city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history; where fact, fiction and myth are blurred – this non-hierarchical approach also determined the construction of the characters and narrative of DC. The collected texts were published in 2019 as Our Fatal Magic (Strange Attractor, 2019).

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. 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); Tenstakonsthall, Sweden (2017); Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2017); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate, London (2016); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016).