Symphonic Flame — Karoly Tendl Art, Interior, and People Photographer. London, Budapest, Vienna.

Tai Shani, Symphonic Flame, 2026
Wysing Arts Centre

Client
Wysing Arts Centre

Tai Shani is an artist working across performance, film, photography, and installation, using experimental writing as a guiding method. Her texts move between theory and visceral details to construct fragmentary cosmologies shaped by histories of reproductive labour, illness and solidarity. Her work is invested in recovering feminised aesthetic modes, such as the floral, the trippy or the gothic, and her long-term projects work through historical and mythical narratives such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical The City of Ladies. Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present.

Established in 1989, Wysing Arts Centre is a progressive organisation in a rural setting, ten miles from Cambridge city. Across their 11-acre site, Wysing has 20 subsidised studios, accommodation for up to 80 visiting artists annually, recording and ceramics studios that are open for public membership, flexible space to experiment, present and learn, fields, woodland, and several outdoor outworks.

What a privilege to photograph Tai Shani’s work! For this job, I worked closely with Jenny O’Neill, Wysing’s Marketing and Communications Manager. We discussed angles, and atmosphere, and as always: what it is that she would like to communicate with the photos in the future. Then I got to work for a few hours, taking photos from precisely set up angles, while making sure not to disturb the life at Wysing with my presence. Still, we could arrange for a 4m ladder, to take photos of the beautiful details of the glass flame at the top of Tai Shani’s candles. It was really a wonderful experience taking these photos in the beautiful settings at Wysing.

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