Tai Shani: Dark Contintent Performance
Tai Shani’s Dark Continent performance is an experimental adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s proto-feminist book The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), which proposes an allegorical city of womxn. Populated by historical, imagined and non-human womxn, Dark Continent imagines a space and time where sensation and interiority lead the way for a possible post-patriarchal future.
Dark Continent was produced in collaboration with Glasgow International.
Please note this performance contains partial nudity.
“A city of women”, as proposed by Christine de Pizan in her 1405 proto-feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies, a construct often revisited by feminist science fiction authors such as Pamela Sargent in The Shore of Women, Sally Miller Gearheart in The Wanderground and Suzy McKee Charnas in The Mother Lines, has served as a significant narrative device to articulate feminism’s ultimate goals; egalitarian civilizations and realities beyond gender. Dark Continent too takes this structure of an allegorical city of women to explore ‘feminine’ subjectivity and experience, the feminine not as female but as “a kind of radical otherness to any conception of the real”, as well as the potentials of a realism defined by excess and the irrational, qualities traditionally surrounding notions of “femininity”. A non-place, a home to out-of-placeness, a deliverance from otherness.
‘Dark Continent’ is the gates to this city out of time, an installation which combines text, film, sculpture, a series of three staged performances and a window through which to see. A gesamtkunstwerk braiding narratives, fictions and mythologies, a Dionysian descent into rapture, ideology, language and flesh into the bottomless pit told through a neanderthal hermaphrodite, a medieval mystic and the woman on the edge of time.
A city gated by sirens, the siren’s song, a song that leads us to a place of origin and disappearance, an approach to what is not yet there, a city which is simultaneously internal and geographic, past and future, part ruin, part construction, existing between destruction and becoming.
Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice, 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 female otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchy. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affects of the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism.
Tai Shani's on-going project Dark Continent Productions that proposes an allegorical city of women, is 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 an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. This non-hierarchical approach also determines the construction of the characters and narrative of Dark Continent.
Tai Shani was born in London. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, recent exhibitions and commissions include, Glasgow International (2018) Wysing Arts Centre (2017); Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); RADAR commission, Loughborough University, (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016); Tate Britain (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); ICA, London (2011)