Tai Shani: The World to Me Was a Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent

1 May-20 Dec 2024

Overview

The Jencks Foundation presents The World to Me Was a Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent, a site-specific exhibition by Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani, on display at The Cosmic House 1 May – 20 December 2024.

The exhibition responds to the unique context of The Cosmic House and traces the connections between the artist’s thinking and that of its designer, Charles Jencks, touching on anthropomorphism, Ad-Hocism, surrealism and the Promethean impulse.

Shani’s work at The Cosmic House draws on the various mythologies that were metabolised in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; A Modern Prometheus. A surrealist exquisite corpse made real, Frankenstein’s Monster sits within Charles Jencks’ definition of Ad-Hocism which, for Jencks, meant the unintended use of materials and objects with surreal results.

As a riposte to the abstract ‘language’ of Modern Architecture, The Cosmic House re-centred the human figure as its main subject; a theme that can be traced through its playful metaphors of architectural elements as body parts. In Jencks’ Cosmic House, doors with symmetrical handles are metaphors of the body, capitals, windows and facades become faces. A built manifesto of Post-Modernism, the house doubles up as a personal self-portrait of Jencks and his family.

While exploring the mimesis between the house and the body, Shani’s poetic intervention connects Ad-Hocism to artistic creation. The exhibition’s title directly quotes Shelley’s novel, and the four different hues of green read like an incantation that references the viridescent cinematic depictions of the Monster. Her installation transforms the lower-ground floor gallery space of the house and the ensemble of the sculptural elements, prints and paintings illustrate the miracle of synthetic life. Two large aquaria at the centre with see-through resin and jesmonite sculptures depict the circulatory systems of the body placed besides city-like architectural structures inhabited by dwarf blue shrimp. The gallery floor is transformed by a large carpet in pink hues, inverting the original green fake malachite floor into a soft flesh-like surface. From the rear windows facing the Time Garden, a stained glass-like hanging structure with an eye in its centre glances back at the space, as if the building is contemplating itself and its visitors, while it turns into a monster we inhabit.

Shani’s newly commissioned multimedia installation is complemented by a poetic text by the artist (available in print in the gallery), that traces potential links between The Cosmic House and other historical and mythical houses that anthropomorphise architecture – such as the houses of Carlo Mollino, King Ludwig’s operatic castles, and Dali’s dream of Venus Pavillion. The visionary architecture of these buildings share a common character as they unfold around personal cosmologies of their own creators and turn into a series of architectural reproductions of the self.

Tai Shani said: “This is a dream, a synchronous opportunity to further extend the shared sensibilities and themes that run through the house, Jencks’ vision and thinking, and my own. Frankenstein’s creature, Prometheus’ humans made out of clay, Golems, Galatea carved from ivory by Pygmalion’s desire; these ‘works’ are transformed from object to subject by animation, a word that has its progeny in the Latin animatio; the bestowing of life. They live, and are animated by a soul, the anima, the animal. We and a hundred thousand ghosts wrote this text, an unbroken cycle of our interdependent collaboration. This is what we dream for in our creative acts, a transferring of soul from a subjective interior infinite into an object or an image which truly ‘lives’.”

Eszter Steierhoffer, Director of the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House said: “The Cosmic House has been a recurring reference in Tai Shani’s work. We are thrilled to host her exhibition which adds new interpretations to the polyphonic narrative of this complex space. The idea of Jencksian Ad-Hocism gains new meaning in her work as she traces the creative act of the artist to ancient mythologies of creation and their cosmic origins. Her shared interest with Jencks in language and the cosmic oscillates around paramount questions: where do we come from? what makes us human?”

The World to Me Was a Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent is scored by experimental pop composer felicita, and accompanied by a thematic publication with text by Shani and other invited authors such as Anne Boyer, Bassem Saad and Eszter Steierhoffer amongst others, published in collaboration with Strange Attractor and released in autumn 2024.

Tai Shani’s exhibition will be on display at The Cosmic House alongside Madelon Vriesendorp’s Cosmic Housework, which is extended until 13 September 2024.

ABOUT TAI SHANI

Tai 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, by extending into divergent formats and collaborations, fragmentary cosmologies of nonsovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of marginalisation 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. Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-) structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present.

In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, shapes the framework of Shani’s artistic practice. Clusters of work like DC Productions or Neon Hieroglyph take mythical and historical narratives – such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women, or cases of psychedelic ergot poisoning causing social unrest – as a template and retell them, over time, through a range of practices, from watercolours and sculptures to animation in theatrical performance. Collected texts were published in Our Fatal Magic (2019) and The Neon Hieroglyph (2023).  

Tai Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. Her work has been shown extensively in Britain and internationally.  

Artists