For the fourth episode of our encounters, we introduce

Tai shani, a UK-based artist and 2019 joint Turner Prize winner. Shani will be in conversation with Elspeth Mitchell and Lenka Vráblíková discussing her recent work The Neon Hieroglyph, a body of work rooted in histories of ergot – a fungus that grows on rye and other common grains from which LSD is derived.

Shani’s multidisciplinary practice involves the study of feminist histories, myths and psychedelics. Her work, 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 feminine otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchal narratives. These alternate between familiar stylistic tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and the effects of the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism. For more info about Tai Shani, visit our website.

Please, encounter Tai Shani LIVE in the discussion via: bit.ly/JOINmycorrhizalencounterTaiShani
Passcode: mushroom
This conversation is held online via Zoom, recording published afterwards. English only.

Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London. She 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 British Art Show 09, Touring (2021), CentroCentro, Madrid (2019-20), Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunstverein, Austria (2019); Nottingham Contemporary, U.K. (2019); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy (2019); Glasgow International, UK (2018); Tenstakonsthall, Sweden (2017), Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2017); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate, London (2016); and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016). In her project DC Productions (2014-2019) Tai Shani proposed an allegorical city of women, forming 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. This non-hierarchical approach also determined the construction of the characters and narrative of DC. The collected texts were published in 2019 as 'Our Fatal Magic'.

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Through the previous Mycorrhizal Encounters we’ve met with: Peter McCoy, a US based mycology educator, author and founder of Radical Mycology; Jonáš Gruska, a Slovakian sound-artist and organizer of mykoLOM festival; Xalli Zúñiga, a Mestizx artist/academic/curator, who explores collaborative practices of drawing, thinking and being with fungi as an eco-feminist and anti-colonial political project and Chido Govera, the founder of The Future of Hope Foundation and a pioneer of the conversion of coffee grounds from cafes into mushroom initiatives, inspiring entrepreneurs around the world.

The upcoming and closing episode of the Mycorrhizal Encounters will welcome a US-based anthropologist Anna Tsing, the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

The Mycorrhizal Encounters series is prepared by Lenka Vráblíková, Elspeth Mitchell and Tereza Porybná as part of the Descendants of Fungi and (Eco)Politics of Sharing festival.

The Descendants of Fungi Festival is organized by Woods – Community for cultivation, theory and art in cooperation with Are and the Institute of Anxiety.

For more information, please, contact les@are-events.org

Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, State Cultural Fund and Waterrain.