THE NEON HIEROGLYPH REDUX ALIVE / FUTUR.SHOCK & PARRHESIADES / FOLD, UK 2021

FOLD and parrhesiades present a special screening of Tai Shani’s ‘The Neon Hieroglyph’ with a live score by composer Maxwell Sterling, and narration by Molly Moody.

‘The Neon Hieroglyph’ is a 57 minute hallucination around Ergot and various historic feminised nodes and other orbital considerations, forming a series of poetic considerations on the fungus that grows on rye and other common grains from which LSD is derived. Travelling from the cellular to the galactic, from Palaeolithic cave markings to the optic markings left by drone photography in our internal eye, dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, descents and ascents. The building of a house we will never live in, a house for our ghosts, where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affects and fractal dread form a mausoleum for psychedelic spectres. 

Also the sun! Sun is a ghost that haunts the night!

Modernity makes witches of mystics and the figure of the witch is to me is a psychedelic one, a threshold between the natural and supernatural, between the material and metaphysical, like ergot, it is an agent that has both a material and immaterial life, a threshold between two realms. The witch is also the vessel of excess, her porosity to the divine becomes her permeability to evil and her pliancy not only makes here a communicative conduit as in the case of the mystics which are messengers, but the witch is the human embodiment of chaotic wickedness and dark powers, and powerful she is but she is also a wrecker of civilisation and morality.
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Parrhesiades is a project established in 2019 by curator Lynton Talbot to work with artists for whom language, either written, spoken or otherwise performed is an essential part of their practice. Together with the artist, parrhesiades develops ways that a single work might exist across multiple platforms. A distributed model for exhibition that incorporates a partner institution, a speculative book, and an online space.

By inviting artists to work through the different physicalities and temporalities that this offers, the work is made available to a public in a way that problematises a single reading. It is not positioned as an attempt to rise above complicity in our contested territories for art but instead forges a fugitive complicity based on shared practice and a more distributed encounter. Parrhesiades hopes to materialize new forms of social relations, and subjectivities and offers the possibility that critique stays with the work and audience in the distributed mode, rather than being co-opted by the institution itself.

As such, Tai Shani’s Neon Hieroglyph will migrate across the various platforms and time-frames of the parrhesiades infrastructure. The live performance of the film’s score at FOLD, London will be streamed at parrhesiades.com and expanded elements form the work and its production will appear in print later in 2022 as part of parrhesiades second print volume.