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‘Womanhood’ is a troubled concept in the world of Semiramis Gathered together for Tai Shani’s first institutional solo exhibition, at The Tetley in Leeds, are the videos, prints and sculptural installations that make up Dark Continent – a project four years in the making, titled after Freud’s description of female sexuality To wander through the galleries is like diving vagina-first into a cyborgian erotic tunnel, in which strange and magnificent characters tell tales of squirting fluids and menstrual blood In a room displaying documentation of her performances at Glasgow International in 2018, I put on a pair of headphones A voice informs me that its ‘cute pussy’ has something to tell me: the characters in this show will not be women any longer, for to be called ‘wo-man’ is to be tied to men through the language of the lack, to the absence of male genitalia   Semiramis is inspired by The Book of the City of Ladies, an early feminist text by the French Renaissance writer Christine de Pizan, written in 1405 Considered Pizan’s most important work, it was written with the intention of countering the notion that women were of a lesser species Pizan imagined the book as a symbolic city in which to house the biographies of historically significant women, shielding them from misogynistic attack The book is an early example of a feminist biographical catalogue, a genre which celebrates the lives of figures from history and myth   Taking Pizan’s book, and blending it with feminist science fiction, Shani has created her own gothic world of characters In Vampyre (2017) – one of several large, single screen moving image installations shown in dimly lit rooms – I encounter a head with a halo of blonde locks and fanged teeth Floating among waves and marine bioluminescence, she is forever trapped in a liminal state between life and death Other characters include The Neanderthal (2018); The Woman on the Edge of Time (2018), the title of which Shani has borrowed from Marge Piercy’s 1976 classic work of speculative feminist science fiction; and Mnemesoid (2018), the human embodiment of an open source database trying