Tai Shani
Lupae-Lux, 2024
£3,600
Hand blown glass pendant light by Tai Shani, exclusive to House of Voltaire
Edition Size
15
Dimensions
65 x 40 x 40 cm
Finishing
Hand-blown glass with cast steel fixings and lighting components
Each edition is made to order by the artist with a lead time of approximately 2-4 weeks
Courtesy the artist and Turner Contemporary
About The Artwork
Lupae-Lux is an industrial rococo lamp named ‘she wolf light’, in reference to sculpture of the wolf that suckles the twins Remus and Romulus, the twins were a later medieval addition to the famous statue. A French edition poster for Fellini’s Roma depicts a woman in the same pose as the wolf with multiple breasts, the tagline is “Rome is a beautiful place to wait for the end of the world”. Each light is assembled by the artist using glass breasts, hand-blown by a master glass blower.
About Tai Shani
Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Shani’s texts attempt to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised nonsovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labour, illness 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.
In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, often shapes Shani’s approach: her long-term projects work through historical and mythical narratives, such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women or the social history of psychedelic ergot poisoning. Extending into divergent formats and collaborations, Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present.
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.