Tai Shani’s practice spans across film, performance, photography, sculpture, and installation, often stemming from textual elements. Her emotionally resonant works blend intricate monologues with vivid installations, evoking disturbing and divine images in the viewer’s minds. Shani is interested in femininity and what is salvageable of its disparate history, beyond patriarchal limits. She draws inspiration from these overlooked sources to create immersive, darkly fantastical realms suggestive of a distant utopia. Blending familiar storytelling with academic writing, Shani explores topics surrounding how we understand ourselves as holistic, emotional beings, whilst creating a new, post-patriarchal reality.
Combining hallucinatory CGI with video, The Neon Hieroglyph (2022) steers the audience through a dreamlike journey beyond the mortal realm and to the mystic. The ‘neon hieroglyph’ of the title refers to common imagery experienced by people having psychedelic hallucinations, searching for a feeling of understanding that transcends the sober brain. Shani constructs an alternative universe influenced by her research into ergot, a fungus found on common grains like rye, known for yielding LSD. Shani draws from historical incidents of ergot poisoning and mass hallucinations, including the 1920 Manchester outbreak and similar events on the Italian island of Alicudi, where food shortages left civilians no choice but to consume the fungus. Shani explores how these hallucinations can inspire alternative realities and futures, particularly from a feminist perspective. Composed of nine short episodes and featuring a haunting soundtrack by Manchester-born composer Maxwell Sterling, The Neon Hieroglyph incorporates a multitude of visual references, from ancient cave art to contemporary drone photography, and addresses topics such as dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, and hyper-sexual fungi.
The acquisition of Shani’s moving image work fits within the moving image collection of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Whilst the collection began in 2000 with a gift from the Contemporary Art Society of Sodastream (1995), a video by Roddy Buchanan, the museum has been actively developing this collection since 2007. Shani’s work, which explores the intersections between feminism, technology, and history, aligns with the museum’s dedication to represent contemporary, post-colonial perspectives.
