Tai Shani, Your Arms Outstreched Above Your Head, Coding With the Angels [Installation View], 2022. Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock.

Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph: My Hieromantic Object, 2022. Polystyrene, epoxy, jesmonite, glass, 220 x 80 x 80 cm, Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock

Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph: Astrolatrous Communes I&II, 2022, Bas relief: MDF, Jesmonite, flock, paint, 120 x 80 x 10 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock

Tai Shani, Your Arms Outstreched Above Your Head, Coding With the Angels [Installation View], 2022. Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock.

Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph: Polymorph, Dreaming Android, Flaming Seraph, 2022, Hand blown glass globe, Epoxy hand with St. Lucy's eyes, Sand /Polystyrene, Jesmonite, Gold leaf, 160 x 30 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock

Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph: Astrolatrous Communes I&II, 2022, Bas relief: MDF, Jesmonite, flock, paint, 120 x 80 x 10 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock

Tai Shani, Unresurrectable Biologies - Un-Undead 1 & 2, 2022, Epoxy, glass, epoxy, 3D prints, mohair sheepskin, electrics, 170 x 50 x 37 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock

Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph: Cum candle / the sun is a ghost that haunts the night & NH Crypt 5, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Gathering, photography © Brotherton Lock

YOUR ARMS OUTSTRETCHED ABOVE YOUR HEAD, CODING WITH THE ANGELS / GATHERING LONDON 2022

YOUR ARMS OUTSTRETCHED ABOVE YOUR HEAD, CODING WITH THE ANGELS encompasses watercolours, acidic geometries, glass eyes glowing with hunger as well as strained concepts of love, many candles, the sun. (The sun is a ghost here.) What brings these divergent things together in the precarious cosmology of this situation, is a trip. It would be reductive to describe this trip – seemingly induced by a mushroom known as ergot but not only – as either geographical or psychedelic, wholesome or decadent, because it feels like an actual, on-going transition: from individual need to shared heartbreak, to a depersonalized possibility of life beyond survival.

- Maxi Wallenhorst

The film ‘The Neon Hieroglyph’ (57 min.) is the primary piece around which the other works revolve. It tells, in abstracted prose, nine hypnotic stories of this feminist, political, psychedelic mythology. Hallucinatory CGI video and a haunting soundtrack by the Manchester-born composer Maxwell Sterling, draws us into Shani’s trip; an exploration of ‘acid communism’, the equalising experience of hallucination, focusing the mind on primordial sensory and existential instinct.

Nine watercolours line the adjacent wall, illustrating each chapter of the film, following the slow entry into what Shani refers to as the ‘crypt’. The dots permeating each image simulate the invasive growth of ergot on both rye and mind, with constricted blood vessels weaving through mausoleum-like structures. Doors open and close, black abysses are revealed, possibilities within the trip appear indefinite.

In descending down the pink lit stairs, we enter a more physical representation of the crypt, the tangible gut of her narrative. The black holes expand in a series of larger paintings, and emerge outward, in 3D architectural reliefs, which are arial views of imaginary communes. Between them is a sculptural exploration into the mythical and religious history of the divine feminine. Shani uses iconography from religion, such as the altar and eyes of Saint Lucy, alongside visual references from other patriarchal power structures such as the gilded Greek columns. They frame the mausoleum in the nave of the room in which the maiara’s relics lie. A burial ground of myth and fantasy.