Tarek Lakhrissi / Tai Shani
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Tarek Lakhrissi (lives and works in Paris) is a French artist and poet with a background in literature who explores sociopolitical narratives and speculative situations of transformation and magic through text, film, installation, and performance. Lakhrissi has been exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museum of Contemporary Art; 22nd Biennale of Sydney (Sydney), Wiels (Brussels), Frieze (UK), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hayward Gallery (London), La Verrière, Fondation Hermès (BE), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Auto Italia South East (London), Grand Palais, FIAC (Paris), Fondation Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), Palazzo Re Rebaudengo/Sandretto (Guarene/Torino), Manchester International Festival (Manchester), Mostyn, (Llandudno), Tinguely Museum (Basel), HKW (Berlin), ICA (Londres), Shedhalle (Zurich); Fondation Ricard (Paris), Quadriennale di Roma; Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Roma), High Art (Paris), Kevin Space (Vienna), L’Espace Arlaud (Lausanne), Zabriskie (Geneva), Fondation Gulbenkian (Paris), Veda gallery (Firenze), CRAC Alsace (Altkirch), Kim? (Riga), Artexte (Montreal), Gaité Lyrique (Paris), SMC/CAC; (Vilnius). Lakhrissi’s artworks are part of different private and public collections like Defares, Sandretto Foundation or CNAP. He is represented by VITRINE Gallery (London/Basel) and Galerie Allen (Paris).
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.
