Tai Shani: ‘When you get older, art becomes more solitary’

The Spell or The Dream plays with the idea of fairytale curses while addressing themes of capitalism and colonial history. Tell me about it.

So there’s this giant blue character – either under a spell or in some kind of somnambulist hallucination. I was interested in dreaming, which has very strong connections with surrealist thinking and the way they thought about the unconscious in our daily lives. Dreaming is limitless in its possibilities and is often the first step in transcending a political horizon.

You’ve said your work often explores emotional states that exist beyond language. How does this project do that?

It speaks to different forms of logic. The radio station, for example, which runs concurrently to the sculpture, is an aural window into the mind-state of the sleeping character. Some artists are responding to it in a very loose way, looking at how memory and dreams operate, and others have a more political approach. It’s a discourse around not just dreaming but psychedelics as well – the whole neighbourhood of altered states.

There’s an incredibly diverse array of minds contributing to the radio, from Brian Eno to Anne Boyer, Cecil B Evans and Yanis Varoufakis. What do they share?

For me, they represent alternatives to what is governing us as a society now. They’re all interested in alternative ways of living and are committed to the idea that what we’re currently living through isn’t good enough.

You grew up in a hippie commune in Goa, starting school aged 10. How did that shape your view of authority?

There were a lot of children who grew up there and no one has turned out the same way, so I don’t think that it completely forms you. But there was no structure. There was a lot of transgression, a lot of testing of boundaries or a complete disregard for them. Not everyone survived that, and sometimes I wonder how I did.

You seem to have done more than survived...

Well, it was also an environment that privileged curiosity and independent thinking. As soon as I could read, I was encouraged to read science fiction. So the idea of passing on some kind of opposition to authority and tradition was an integral part of that project.

Was there any particular sci-fi work that made an impression on you?

Around the age of 12, I read The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent, which really marked me. Then Ursula K Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Octavia E Butler. There’s a lot of really interesting Soviet communist sci-fi films, like Kin-dza-dza!

I noticed you have a few tattoos. Could you tell me about one and its meaning to you?

I’m Jewish, and in Judaism you’re not allowed to tattoo yourself because your body belongs to God. So I like the idea of reclaiming my body. When I lived in Goa, we had a kitten that passed away. It was my first encounter with death and my dad took me to the beach on this spectacular starry night. After we buried the kitten, I asked him what happened to her, and he said, “Her soul is gone, she’s become a star,” and he showed me the star she became. So when he died he became a star [on my arm], and the other star is my brother, who passed away in India as a baby.

Your work conjures imaginary worlds populated by spectral feminist characters. Where do they come from?

They’re often weird amalgamations of this pulpy, B-fiction world, mixed with mythology and sci-fi. I was always interested in horror films too, though I can’t watch horror any more. Over the last two years, we’ve witnessed earth-shattering images almost on a daily basis and it has completely altered my relationship with the need to represent or even speak about violence and horror; it feels incredibly gratuitous.

You lived in Israel for eight years but you are vocal in your support for Palestine.

A lot of my thinking around human rights comes from being a member of a Holocaust family. My grandmother had an unsuccessful abortion in the camps and my mum was born in June 1945. She was recognised as a Holocaust survivor by the German state and was in receipt of reparations. In my family it was not talked about a great amount but it was always framed as something that could happen to any group. “Never again” means never again for anybody. I know what it’s like to live [in Israel] as well. And I know how profound the dehumanisation of Palestinian people, and erasure of their history and life is from society there, because I’ve witnessed it.

When you were nominated for the Turner prize in 2019, you and the other three nominees refused the individual award in favour of collective recognition. When was that decision taken?

Very spontaneously at our first meeting. It’s important to place that year in a period where ideas around emancipation and recognition of colonialism’s violent legacies were very much the main agenda. All of our practices are engaged with these ideas in very different ways but we are all interested in the frameworks of power. It felt like an opportunity to address that through changing ideas around competition.

How do you balance the solitary nature of making art with the need for community?

It’s something I’m definitely suffering from more and more. As a young artist, your social life is completely enmeshed with your practice; you do a lot of things with friends and the social nature of it is integral to how you conceptualise yourself as an artist. But when you get older, it becomes more solitary. When I hear from my younger friends, it’s clear it hasn’t disappeared completely; it’s just that I’m in a different phase now. 

The Spell or The Dream is at Somerset House from Thursday until 14 September. It will then be on show at Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh from 10 October to 27 September 2026

Photograph by Sophia Evans for The Observer