‘W.O.W. Noumenon Dilation: Reduced to 3’ a performance by Tai Shani

Saturday 13th March 11.45pm
Rio Cinema, Dalston, London

Artprojx presents

‘W.O.W. Noumenon Dilation: Reduced to 3’

a performance by Tai Shani.

This fantastical new project consists of a re-working of ‘World on a Wire’, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s science fiction novel, ‘Simulacron 3’.

To mark the dimensional, space-time shift phenomenon due to occur that night ‘W.O.W. Noumenon Dilation: Reduced to 3’ is a live teleportation of Fassbinder’s anti-hero from ‘The New Orpheum Theatre’, a fictional cinema, to the magnificent, art deco auditorium of the Rio Cinema in Dalston. Travelling through degrees of fiction and temporality, he will materialise into three time machines, three body doubles, collapsing, colliding and forever reproduced.

The performance incorporates a specially commissioned film by LA based artist Damon Packard, CCTV footage, animations, a Fassbinder Chorus Line and a Greek chorus.

This piece continues on from a series of large-scale, cinematic performances that contain science fiction themes, such as time travel and parallel universe realities. Tai Shani’s work explores the structure of fiction, the cinematic memory and its corruption of innate memory as well as the relationship between various mediated and simulatory channels, the limits of their agency and the ‘real’.

"But Tai's work isn't just a fun mix of all the cool 60's sci-fi look; she's also interested in presenting some of the forgotten or overlooked areas of sci-fi, questioning what writers chose to document and what history chooses to remember. I like the idea that Tai's interest in science fiction allows her to create a non-linear narrative thread scooped out from historical material that reflects alternative notions of the future. It's as if she's merging these versions together to create her own hybrid image and narrative." - Gemma De Cruz, Art and Music

"There is also a certain humility in works such as 'Empire & Daughter Isotope' since Shani does not remove herself from the league of fantasists: she too might be subject to the aspirations for a thrilling desire that never quite delivers when implemented. But even if the subject matter talks of a certain loss in enacting desire, a kind of absurd anti-climax then, in contrast, her performances often afford the audience exactly the opposite experience. They deliver a riveting thing to live through that we rarely associate with performance art." - Ken Pratt, Wound Magazine