MY BODILY REMAINS / CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTRE CINCINNATI 2023

In Shani’s first solo U.S. museum exhibition, she presents work centered around the newly commissioned feature-length film ‘My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, and all the Bodily Remains that Ever Were and Ever Will Be’ (2023). The film references sci-fi literature, video games, and horror films to craft a speculative journey narrated by four protagonists as they grapple with fundamental questions about love, grief, and societal change. Quotations by leftist revolutionaries of the last 150 years punctuate the narrative, offering a timely critique of the current global rise of fascist politics and war.

Accompanying the film is an immersive installation comprising a large-scale stepped platform accessorized with an array of artifacts - pearlescent spheres of various sizes, suspended columns, and a lightbox picturing an anthurium flower dripping with blood. These objects extend the film's central characters and themes and refer to ideas of spirituality, sexuality, and the uncanny. Related forms appear in an adjacent suite of watercolors and a triptych, which feature trompe /bev/ ribbons and whimsical bubbles layered upon paintings of portals, crypts, doonvays, and windows.

Also in the exhibition is an earlier film that narrates the transformative effects of psychedelics as catalysts for social critique, transcendence, and liberation. Renderings of natural sites such as rivers, caves, and galaxies signify thresholds between otherworldly spaces, life and death, and different states of awareness. Together, the works in this exhibition draw from political ideologies of collectivism and propose love as a device for healing and resistance.

___________________

Curated by Amara Antilla, Curator at Large, with Erin Adelman, Curatorial Assistant

CCA Cincinnati have co-commissioned this film, along with Art Night, KM21 and POR:TA Association.