The Neon Hieroglyph: down, Rharian field, ellipses, carnivores, swanskin, and poplin

Beyond Surrealism, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2025

More than a hundred years ago, a group of writers, poets and artists emerged in Paris. They called themselves Surrealists and dreamed of a completely different world in which reason and logic had no place. In their view, society had failed. Through their art and way of life, they sought to bring about radical change.

The British artist Tai Shani (1976) likewise questions whether our society could be organised differently. In her large-scale installations and sculptures, she explores alternative realities. This also applies to the installation she presents during Beyond Surrealism. At its centre is the hallucinatory effect of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and grain from which LSD is derived. Shani investigates how psychedelics might serve as gateways to other realities and utopian visions of the future. What one discovers in such an experience, she suggests, can be the first step towards social transformation.

In earlier iterations, Shani saw the ghost as a catalyst for change, as a call to reorganise the world. That hope now seems to have vanished. The ghost has become elusive, as fleeting as the demons evoked in gouache by the German artist and poet Unica Zürn (1916–1970).

Commissioned as part of Beyond Surrealism, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Sculpture originally commissioned by Carla Fendi Foundation and the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in 2021.