Tabita Rezaire, Fusion élémen.terre

For her first solo exhibition in France, the artist Tabita Rezaire (born in 1989, lives and works in Guyana, France) is presenting a body of work that combines new technology and ancestral rites.

As an artist, farmer, yoga teacher and doula (a person who provides support to pregnant women), Rezaire sees herself as the intercessor, providing us with other ways of accessing the world. Through her video installations, she reinvents contemporary technologies in light of ancestral sciences to rethink our relationship with the cosmos, by reoccupying our corporeal, secular and digital memory.

In the Post-Internet world, she imagines new connecting technologies by invoking natural elements, such as water, air and nourishing earth, as well as the healing arts. In her works, she appears as a digital incarnation of a cosmic being that plays with internet codes, combining digital, corporeal, scientific and spiritual realities with traditional knowledge as part of a post-colonial context.

In one of her recent projects, she created the AMAKABA site in the Amazon rainforest in Guyana, designed to be a multifaceted space where the energy of the earth (through the cultivation of cocoa), the body (with doula support and yoga) and the sky (an observatory) come together, giving birth to new scenarios for being-in-the-world.

The exhibition has been designed as a multi-dimensional voyage where each installation becomes a portal through which we are all invited to reconnect with the Universe.

The exhibition "Fusion élémen.terre" presents the work begun by the artist Tabita Rezaire several years ago through the presentation of three immersive installations created between 2017 and 2022. Conceived between past and future, ancestral myths and contemporary technologies, each installation is a portal where the worlds of cyberspace, the living and the ancestors converge. Each is also a reflection on the coexistence between the human presence and the natural elements, through the successive exploration of stones, plants and water.

Rezaire has participated in many exhibitions in France and abroad, including at the Serpentine, London (2022), the Hayward Gallery, London (2022); the Biennale of Sydney (2022) and Busan (2022); the Shanghai Biennale (2021); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018).

Curators
Annabelle Ténèze, Director of Les Abattoirs
Lauriane Gricourt, Curator at Les Abattoirs

 

I want to establish pathways between heaven and earth, between the living and the dead, in a world where celestial bodies, mineral life and spirits sing together, because throughout the ages, different cultures around the world have looked to the heavens to understand the mysteries of the universe.

Mamelles ancestrales (2019) is an evocation of the megalithic stone circles of Senegambian and African cosmogonies. The installation is inspired by megaliths, those ancestral stones and monuments erected and arranged in circles from the 3rd century BC to the 16th century AD in the region of Africa that includes Senegal and the Gambia. In Senegal, these monuments (of which there are more than 1,000) are the remains of a rich and diverse local culture, whose customs and knowledge were gradually lost over the colonial period.

In the video that is projected into the middle of this stone circle, Tabita Rezaire brings together accounts collected from four major sites: Sine Ngayène and Wanar in Senegal, and Wassu and Kerbatch in Gambia’s central river region. She spoke with local inhabitants, site custodians, archaeologists and astrologists, each person sharing their own understanding of the monuments with the artist: as sacred spaces devoted to ancestors, funeral sites, or astronomical observatories. This created a dialogue between interpretations that are usually seen as contradictory, based on archaeology, science, spirituality, and traditions. Originating from the idea that the megaliths are “technological remains” that allow us to connect with the heavens, the film weaves together the elements of a story that bring forgotten or undervalued cosmological knowledge back to the center of the history of space exploration and our relationship with space. In the form of an incantation, Rezaire suggests a reappraisal of the hierarchy of the world’s forms of knowledge.

With a view to protecting the environment, the stones used in the installation were sourced locally. They come from the Perbencous quarry in Durenque, Aveyron (Occitanie).

In the middle of the artistic, almost initiatory voyage presented to the visitor by Tabita Rezaire, the Ikum: Drying Temple installation (2022) is at once a sculpture to be passed through and experienced, a textile work, a living installation made of plants, and an audio and performative space. It was designed in collaboration with designer Yussef Agbo-Ola (Olaniyi Studio, London) and was initially presented at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2022. The artwork has now been reactivated and remodeled for the space at Les Abattoirs, giving new relevance to the tribute it pays to the Earth and the good it does.

Its wooden structure, inspired by the morphology of ants, is covered in fabric, calling to mind the “symbolic textile traditions” of the Yoruba (one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa) and the Cherokee (an indigenous people of North America), from whom Yussef Agbo-Ola is descended. The fibers are interwoven with plants chosen by the artists for their medicinal properties. The shape of the “temple” highlights the insect’s role in dispersing seeds and maintaining healthy soils. Over the course of the exhibition, the plants will gradually dry out, creating an “orchestra of aromas” and inviting the audience to reconnect with the power of the plant kingdom and reflect on nature as it transforms and regenerates. A piece of music entitled “Plant Lungs in River Dust” is designed as a soundscape, enabling visitors to hear the “voices” of the plants and expand the immersive and sensory elements of the installation.

Once the exhibition has finished, the artwork will continue its life: the plants will be offered to visitors, thus prolonging Ikum’s presence. The fabric will be dismantled and relocated to Amakaba, a center created in 2021 by Rezaire in the Amazon Rainforest in French Guyana. Amakaba is an eco-farm growing cocoa, a yoga center, and a space for traditional ceremonies that has been developed as a space for living and healing through the connections between art, nature, science, and spirituality.

To ensure the sparing use of materials, the installation has been created primarily with wood recycled from previous exhibitions.

Artist Tabita Rezaire appears in the form of her digital avatar in the work Dilo, a large-format digital wallpaper. As an introduction to the film Deep Down Tidal, this half-woman, half-snake mermaid 2.0 becomes an allegory and an ironic muse for the birth of water technologies dominated by the internet. By reappropriating the aesthetic of the Web, 3D objects, gifs, and science-fiction to create digital collages, the artist is questioning how information transferred on the Web is acquired and how, unlike the internet’s early inclusive and global potential, new invisibilities are created and dominant cultures are consolidated. By staging herself at the center of this flux of Web and water, Rezaire is underlining the fact that forgotten technological advances, colonial history or even the legacy of now-dematerialized ancestral knowledge are often disregarded by today’s society, which is both over-informed and poorly informed. As a mermaid-avatar who sings of the decolonization of connection technology and with her offbeat yet witty humor, the artist is proposing a different digital aesthetic and alternative paths for emancipation and information.

“What data does the water of our world contain?” This is the question that Rezaire explores in the video Deep Down Tidal (2017), which belongs to the Les Abattoirs collection and is screened on an immersive curved screen, as a complement to Mamelles ancestrales. After the words of the stones, the artist brings together a multitude of stories transmitted by water (spiritual, cosmological, political). With the element of water, she draws the analogy between the flow of water and the flux of information on the internet, taking us along with her on a journey into the flow of her video narrative. Although modern information technology totally pervades our contemporary ways of living, Rezaire feels an urgent need to understand the cultural, political, and environmental forces that have shaped this technology. By observing the network of fiber-optic cables that transfer in real time our digital data, she has noticed that that geographical location coincides with historic colonial maritime routes. From the triangular trade that thrived in the eighteenth century, thanks to the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean, to the current drama of refugees losing their lives in the Mediterranean, water has also become an abyss of lost stories and memories. Water, with its ability to take us on journeys, is also able to memorize, copy, and spread information through its tributaries, transmitting the violent side of modern history too, often hidden behind our never-ending quest for technological progress and the subversion of the very idea of progress.

Tabita Rezaire, born in 1989 in Paris, is of French, Guyanese, and Danish origin. She lives and works in Cayenne, French Guyana.

After doing a bachelor’s degree in economics, Rezaire completed a research master’s at the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London. Since beginning her artistic career and through her works, she has been questioning our relationship with the internet, its place in our lives, and the world it is shaping. Her video installations reinvent and deconstruct the aesthetic of the Web to better denounce the development of digital networks as a new form of domination and colonization. Although Rezaire reveals the mechanisms of a “technological neocolonialism,” she also suggests various remedies, including that of the artist-healer, a role she plays in her films in the form of a digital avatar. Her project SENEB (2016), in which she combined yoga with a reconstruction of Egyptian mythology, and the NTU collective (2015) were designed as objects of digital self-care where science and spirituality come together and whose staging involves a reappropriation of the body, not without a touch of humor. Merging cosmic and scientific worlds, Rezaire’s body of work creates paths for reconciliation and new forms of emancipation and connection to the world and others.

Rezaire thus endeavors to extend the traditional definitions of the role usually attributed to artists by going beyond the screen. This desire for care has taken root in her project Amakaba, located in the Amazon Rainforest in French Guyana, where she has been working since 2021. This eco-farm, where the artist is a farmer, doula, and yoga teacher, combines art and the energies of the body, spirits, and nature.

Like her other works, Amakaba is an invitation to reconnect with our own internal database, to upload information directly from the source and calmly navigate among our digital, corporal, and ancestral memories.

Her work has been presented at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2022); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Sydney Biennale (2022); Busan Biennale (2022); Shanghai Biennale (2021); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018).

Tabita Rezaire is represented by the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, and London).