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. With an introduction by Bridget Crone.
