Tai Shani
Neon Hieroglyph 7, 2021.
Audio, 14 mins.

Neon Hieroglyph 7 was created by Turner Prize 2019 artist Tai Shani and commissioned by More Than Ponies as a work to be ideally experienced whilst wandering amongst trees of the New Forest. Voiced by Molly Moody and featuring a composition by Maxwell Sterling, the artwork forms part of a larger body of work The Neon Hieroglyph.

Tai Shani’s The Neon Hieroglyph is a series of poetic considerations on the feminised history of Ergot, a fungus that grows on various grains, from which LSD is derived. Travelling from the cellular to the galactic, from Palaeolithic cave markings to the optic markings left by drone photography in our internal eye, communist green witch mythologies, dancing plagues, descents and ascents. A fragmented, symbolic mausoleum for psychedelic witches, a house for ghosts where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affects and fractal dread are interpreted into artefacts drawn from a taxonomy of burial objects, structures, and ceremony.

A More Than Ponies Peal commission - an ongoing series of public sound works by leading artists intended to provide individuals with self-led alternative experience of the New Forest woodland or indeed any forest anywhere…

Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London. Her 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. Tai Shani’s project DC Productions (2014-2019) proposed an allegorical city of women, it was 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. The collected texts were published in 2019 as Our Fatal Magic. Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. In 2019 Tai was a Max Mara prize nominee. Her work has been shown at Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunst Verein, Austria (2019); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy (2019); Glasgow International, UK (2018); Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2017); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate, London (2016); Yvonne Lambert Gallery, Berlin (2016) and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016).