Our Fatal Magic
Tai Shani
200pp / 123mm x 190mm
Paperback
£12.99
With an introduction by Bridget Crone.
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Tai Shani’s writing is both oracular and forensic. We each know the power of the first cut and in Our Fatal Magic the cut becomes a sybil, answering each riddle by posing another.
Mesmeric and enlightening.
– Linder Sterling
Bonding the mythological and the poetic with the piercingly contemporary that is, inevitably, a painfully acute register of the lived traumas of gender, racialization, age and diverse embodiment in a society defined by hierarchy and exclusion, Our Fatal Magic takes its unique place in a genealogy of brilliant fictional worlds created by women as testimonies and challenges to the world they have to endure. Tai Shani has reached deep into the dark powers of gothic literature and science fiction to trace an imaginative, polyvocal and visually sumptuous journey that often defies reason. It is exhilarating to encounter a work of such originality, ambition, depth, humour, eroticism, wit and pathos.
– Griselda Pollock
Our Fatal Magic is a collection of feminist science fiction vignettes by contemporary artist Tai Shani, co-winner of the 2019 Turner Prize alongside her three other nominees.
Foregrounding explorations of sensation, experience, and interiority, these twelve fantastical prose pieces – drawn from Shani’s epic DC:Semiramis project – refract their ideas through a series of curious characters, from Medieval Mystics to Cubes of Flesh, Sirens to Neanderthal Hermaphrodites.
Drawing on the speculative narrative strategies pioneered by writers like Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler and others, Our Fatal Magic metabolises new and necessary fictions from feminist and queer theory to propose an erotic and often violent space of critique in which gender constructs are destabilised, alternative histories imagined, and post-patriarchal futures proposed.
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About the author
Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London, UK. 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, fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised non-sovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labor, 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 longterm 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.