Tai Shani

Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London. She is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. Her work is part of institutional collections including Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, UK and Arts Council, UK, and in 2026 she will stage a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. In 2025, Shani’s The Sun Is a Flame That Haunts The Night was on view at the High Line, New York. She also presented The Spell or The Dream, a large-scale installation and radio work at Somerset House, London, which subsequently toured to Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, where it is on view until 27 September 2026. In September 2025, her second solo exhibition with Gathering, Cardinal , spanned both floors with gem-like paintings and a multilayered installation exploring ritual, movement and transformation. Shani’s solo exhibitions include The World to Me Was A Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent at The Cosmic House, London, UK and Lavish Phantoms of the House of Dust at Gio Marconi, Milan, Italy (both 2024). In 2023, Shani was the subject of solo exhibitions at KM21, The Hague, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Her work has been shown at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2025–2026), Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2025), Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2023), British Art Show 09, Touring (2021), CentroCentro, Madrid (2019–20), Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunstverein, Austria (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy (2019); Tensta Konsthall, Sweden (2017), Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2017); Serpentine Galleries, UK (2016); Tate, UK (2016); and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland (2016). Shani’s artistic practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, uses experimental writing as a guiding method. Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Shani’s texts attempt to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised non-sovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labour, illness and solidarity, her work is invested in recovering feminised aesthetic modes – such as the floral, the trippy or the gothic – in a register of utopian militancy. In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, often shapes Shani’s approach: Her long-term projects work through historical and mythical narratives, such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women or the social history of psychedelic ergot poisoning. Extending into divergent formats and collaborations, Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present.