From Moor Mother to Jenna Sutela: Meet the Artists Dreaming with Tai Shani’s Sleeping Giant

This summer, until 14 September 2025, Somerset House’s courtyard plays host to a sleeping figure—huge, blue, and not entirely at rest. The sculpture, The Spell, is the centrepiece of Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s new commission The Spell or The Dream, part of Somerset House’s 25th birthday celebrations. Within its faceted glass case, the reclining body seems caught in suspension, half-breathing, half-waking, as if listening to the world’s catastrophes in uneasy slumber.

From the base of the sculpture, sound seeps into the courtyard. The score is by Maxwell Sterling, composer, producer and double bassist, and a long-time collaborator of Shani’s. “This is the fifth time Tai and I have worked together,” Sterling shares with Something Curated, “and I particularly enjoy working with Tai as her ideas and practice span all things that I love—fictional realities, sculpture, myth making and world building. For The Spell or The Dream, Tai shared early sketches and texts of the work, which were incredibly exciting. By crafting something that ebbs and flows sonically, you can invite a viewer to find their own rhythm and pace within the sound, space and scale of the work. I was particularly interested in how sound can envelop you, guide you, but also contain your thoughts and feelings—a unity and togetherness sometimes more immediate than the written word.”

Shani’s piece isn’t a solitary monument. For the duration of the Somerset House installation, The Dream Radio invites guest contributors and audiences to reimagine new and hopeful ways of being, collectively. Co-curated by Shani, who’s currently in residence at Somerset House Studios, and broadcast globally via Channel, the radio features brand new commissions and contributions, alongside archival work, by an extensive list of artists, writers, musicians, academics, economists, activists and thinkers, exploring dreaming as a radical act. Audiences can tune in online or listen on-site in the Seamen’s Hall and are invited to submit their dreams for interpretation and broadcast on the radio.

Among the contributions that expand the notion of dreaming into a shared public forum is the work of poet, musician and activist Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa). “The work is a live non-linear reading of the Book of Revelations from the Christian Bible,” she explains to SC. “I am very interested in historical and religious texts. I also love reading sacred poetry, folklore, and cultural myths.” For Ayewa, installation and sound are inseparable: “I am a soundscape and installation artist and have presented many solo and collective installations with my collective, with Rasheedah Phillips, Black Quantum Futurism, all over the world. Installation is very important to me and always in communion with sound… I enjoy being in sonic dialogue with other brilliant sound creators whose work is also rooted in the deep past.”

For over seven years, Aura Satz has worked on reimagining sirens and states of emergency. Her piece for The Dream Radio draws from this long project, including music and interviews with figures such as Laurie Spiegel, David Toop, and Evelyn Glennie. “It is both diagnostic of the states of emergency, and propositional,” she explains, “thinking through alternative methods of sounding the alarm alongside different ways of conceptualising what we actually mean by emergency—warnings, safety, evacuation or rescue, for who, in the name of what, short term or long term… There are so many resonances between Tai’s work and mine, not just in terms of questioning how we respond to the polycrisis across ecological and genocidal violence, but also thinking that the answer has to come from a dialogic collective effort. Part of the wider crisis is intertwined with the erosion of our capacity to listen, witness, pay attention. We need to recalibrate so that our listening can become transformative, profoundly changing not just our ability to cope but rendering our solidarity more capacious and effective.”

Katie Shannon, whose practice often weaves together sound, performance, and subcultural histories, brings to the project an audio collage drawn from years of performances and collaborations, much of it created with musician Cucina Povera. Her contribution is restless and layered: covers, textures, overheard voices, club echoes, protest tracks. “I’d bind these bits as work around world ending as opposed to world building,” Shannon says, describing the collection as shot through with fissures and closures. Among the fragments is her cover of Bits and Pieces by Artemesia, “much published as an anthem of sorts of Scottish working class culture.” Her version, she notes, is “quite intensely textured and somewhat deranged; a shift in mood from the happier side of hardcore feels more in tune with the current conditions.”

For Somerset House Studios alum Juliet Jacques, who contributes a reading of her text Sertraline Surrealism, the project allowed her to revisit a deeply personal piece. “It’s about the intense dreams that came on when I started taking SSRIs, and my long-term interest in the French Surrealists, despite their misogyny and homophobia,” Jacques explains. The essay also turns to Claude Cahun, the queer artist and writer who resisted the Nazi occupation of Jersey during World War II. “I chose it partly because I performed it at Somerset House Studios’ opening party in 2016, giving it a link not just with Tai’s work but the place it’s installed, but mainly because it speaks to the politicisation of dreams, and of their radical potential.”

Meanwhile, Finnish artist Jenna Sutela, also an alum of the Studios, has shared the soundscape of her project nimiia cétiï, in which bacterial movements and early speculative Martian language intertwine. “I admire Tai’s work and feel connected to a lot of the contributors,” Sutela says. “Her proposal to consider dreaming as an act of radical imagination resonates with me. In the context of nimiia cétiï, I want to talk about reclaiming dreaming from the machines, from prescriptive, imperial systems.”

Together, these voices forge an intricate polyphony around Shani’s sculpture. From medieval metaphysics to quantum dreaming, Mayan myth to Scottish club culture, The Spell or The Dream gathers an eclectic spectrum of visions. What holds it all together is the insistence that to dream is to resist—that imagination, shared across generations and disciplines, is our most powerful tool. In the artists’ hands, Somerset House’s courtyard becomes a civic stage where dreaming is treated not as frivolity but as necessity, a counter to exhaustion and despair.



Feature image: Tai Shani, The Spell or The Dream, 2025. Somerset House, London. Photo: Tim Bowditch