Tai Shani

Tai Shani (born 1976) is a British artist. Shani uses performance, film, photography, sculptural installations and experimental texts to explore forgotten histories and stories. She is currently a Tutor in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. Shani was born in London.

In 2019, her work DC: SEMIRAMIS commissioned by Glasgow International (May–April 2018) and The Tetley, Leeds (July–October 2018), and her participation in Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary and the De Le Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, was nominated for the Turner Prize. She was awarded the Prize, along with three other artists, after jointly requesting from the jury that all four artists win "in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity".

Work

DC: Productions, which formed part of her 2019 Turner Prize installation at the Turner Contemporary, is inspired by the 15th-century protofeminist text The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan. The title "DC: Productions" alludes to Freud's description of female sexuality, with DC short for ‘Dark Continent’. The White Review dubbed Shani's reimagining of the story as a "feminist science fiction".

Shani's debut book, Our Fatal Magic (ISBN 9781907222818), collects together texts from the DC Productions project.

Awards

Tai Shani and her fellow shortlisted artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Oscar Murillo were jointly awarded the Turner Prize in 2019 after they wrote to the judges as a collective. In their letter the artists explained their decision: "The politics we deal with differ greatly, and for us it would feel problematic if they were pitted against each other, with the implication that one was more important, significant or more worthy of attention than the others."