Tai Shani

Essays that trace connections between the work of Turner Prize-winning artist Tain Shani and the intellectual legacy of Charles Jencks, one of postmodernism's most playful architectural thinkers. In this newly edited collection of essays, leading writers trace connections between the unique work of Turner Prize-winning multi-media artist Tain Shani, and the intellectual legacy of Charles Jencks, one of postmodernism's most playful architectural thinkers. Catalysed by Shani's exhibition The World To Me Was A Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, And Virescent, developed for The Cosmic House in 2024, this far-reaching book draws upon the various mythologies metabolised by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. A surrealist exquisite corpse made real, the writings gathered here reanimate Frankenstein's Monster within Jencks' definition of Ad-Hocism, whereby the use of materials and objects for unintended purposes, might yield surreal results. A collaboration between The Cosmic House and Strange Attractor Press, Cosmic Caesious, Cosmic Zinnober, Cosmic Celadon, Cosmic Virescent includes newly commissioned works by Anne Boyer, Annabel Frearson, Emily LaBarge, Bassem Saad, and Taylor Le Melle that explore themes of anthropomorphism, the tangled legacies of surrealism, and the Promethean impulse. The book also includes a foreword by Eszter Steierhoffer, Director of The Jencks Foundation, and an introduction and original text by artist Tai Shani.

A series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD from the author of Our Fatal Magic. From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind's eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD. The Neon Hieroglyph constructs a house of lyrical reflections for our ghosts to inhabit, a place where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affect and fractal dread form a mausoleum for psychedelic specters. And also the Sun The Sun is a ghost that haunts the night Framed with new essays by artist and writer Caspar Heinemann and anthropologist Amy Hale, Tai Shani's The Neon Hieroglyph continues a journey into the post-patriarchal fictions that animated her first collection Our Fatal Magic.

Feminist science fiction that anticipates a post-patriarchal future. Our Fatal Magic is a collection of feminist science fiction by contemporary artist Tai Shani. Foregrounding explorations of sensation, experience, and interiority, these twelve fantastical prose vignettes refract their ideas through a series of curious characters, from Medieval Mystics to Cubes of Flesh, from Sirens to Neanderthal Hermaphrodites. Drawing on the speculative narrative strategies pioneered by writers like Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler and others, Our Fatal Magic metabolizes new and necessary fictions from feminist and queer theory to propose an erotic, often violent space of critique in which gender constructs are destabilized, alternative histories imagined, and post-patriarchal futures proposed.