Tai Shani

The Neon Hieroglyph (video), 2021.
"The Neon Hieroglyph" is inspired by research into ergot as a psychedelic catalyst, a fungus that grows on rye and other common grains from which the hallucinogenic drug LSD is derived. There were many ergot poisoning outbreaks linked to the local crops and rye bread which caused mass hallucinations, with the last reported UK incident during the late 1920s in Manchester.

For Shani, the psychedelic is a space that can drive new visions of society, an imaginative space where new futures can emerge. "The Neon Hieroglyph" uses these experiences to spark new visions and alternative realities: a dreamlike CGI journey that takes us on an epic journey across time and space - from the cellular to the galactic; from Palaeolithic cave markings to the optic markings left by drone photography as well as dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches and hyper-sexual fungi.

Om:
Tai Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani creates violent, erotic and fantastical images told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines female otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchal narratives. These alternate between familiar stylistic tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and the affects of the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism.

Utställningsplats: Sundsvalls museum