Buzzy young artist Tabita Rezaire has been described as an “Afro-cyber-feminist”—and the description fits. Rezaire, who is of French Guianese and Danish descent, makes dizzying and daring new media installations that explore the connections between the technological, the spiritual, and the terrestrial. Her installations are often filled with bright, millennial colors and cosmic imagery while speaking to decolonization, African forms of feminism, and the links between heaven and earth.
The artist, who grew up in Paris and graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2013 with a master’s in moving image, has earned exhibitions with leading galleries, including Arebyte Gallery, in London, and Goodman Gallery, in Johannesburg, her representing gallery. Her works have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London, among numerous other international institutions.
Recently, Rezaire opened her institutional debut in Spain with “Calabash Nebula” at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. The exhibition, curated by Chus Martinez, includes three new installations and is a kind of culmination of the artist’s remarkable ascent through the art world over recent years.
Tabita Rezaire, Omu Elu (2024). Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
The exhibition also comes at a fascinating juncture for the artist and her career. Rezaire has become a farmer—a cocoa farmer to be exact. Over the past several years, the artist, who is now based in Cayenne, French Guiana, has worked to build an ethical and sustainable cocoa farming community in her ancestral land. The farm is part of AMAKABA, a larger center she founded with an intersectional mission combining the study of art, science, and astronomy alongside spiritual and ancestral philosophy. The center also includes a yoga center.
In many ways, Rezaire’s work as a farmer is the fruition of her artistic fascinations, including the reclamation of indigenous knowledge bases and understanding of the cosmos. The artist, intriguingly, sees these ancient forms of knowledge as bolstered by modern science and technology, rather than in opposition.
In that sense, the museum show serves as a pivotal point, as Rezaire turns toward a new horizon, and away from her identity as an artist in her current form.
“In some ways, I see it as the death of my career,” she said “What I do works in cycles and to nurture the cycles, you have to come from a fertile place Everything in life feeds on life. Life eats life. I’ve come to a point where the part of me as an artist has been dying. Maybe if it’s given an opportunity to fully die, so then I can hopefully have an opportunity to burst and be born in a different form”
Tabita Rezaire. Photo by Ange Nieux.
“Calabash Nebula” hints at the directions her interests are now taking, linking ecology, biodiversity, and ancestral knowledge, with art, spirituality, and technology. The immersive exhibition includes three installations, two of which are tied to Orisha Yemoja, the mother spirit of rivers.
“Rezaire shines a spotlight on myths, wisdom, and cognitive practices of non-western cultures, often erased by colonial powers and the way in which those powers structure the extraction of natural, corporeal, and mental resources from territories,” said curator Chus Martínez in a statement.
For Rezaire the three installations form a triptych that can be navigated cyclically, again and again. The works are deeply rooted in French Guiana and the indigenous knowledge of the native people and African people who were brought to the country, some of whom escaped enslavement by fleeing into the forest. “Colonization was not very successful here,” the artist explained “The country is 95 percent Amazonian forest, and only 5 percent is inhabited.”
Entering the exhibition visitors are greeted by Omu Elu (2024), an installation of six textiles depicting varied incarnations of the Orisha Yemoja. The goddess here appears at large scale as mother, water, creator, healer, ruler, and dancer. The installation’s textiles were made in Rezaire’s own indigo vat, which she established after working with traditional dyers in Nigeria. Indigo here becomes an emblem of healing, with the indigo’s various shades of blue mirroring the goddess’s multifaceted nature.
Tabita Rezaire, Des/astres (2024). Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Following from here, one encounters Des/astres, an installation debuting for the first time, which takes inspiration from the “tukisipan” buildings and “malawana” (house sky of the Wayana, an indigenous Karib-speaking people who inhabit stretches of Brazil and French Guyana. With the title, the artist, who was raised in Paris, makes on play on the English word “disaster” and the French words “astres” meaning the stars, hinting at cosmology’s ancient roots in explaining our universe.
Here, the artist constructed a circular structure, inspired by the malawana which are gathering spaces for celebrations, collaboration, and assemblies. A video is projected on the underside of the structure’s roof; filled with celestial imagery the video traces both Amazonian astronomical traditions and French Guiana’s pivotal position in the global climate; the nation is home to the European Spaceport. “The country is an epicenter of spatial politics, but at the same time, the film asks how indigenous people and the different communities of French Guiana engage with the beyond and the cosmos, which often is through the forest, tree spirits, or dreams” explained the artist. “It’s another way of crossing the boundary of the realm of earth into the beyond.” Visitors are invited to rest in hand-woven Amerindian hammocks made of cotton and palm leaves inside the structure and watch the video which follows through four sections (forest, water, stone, and sky). The video also includes interviews with scientists, researchers, and knowledge keepers.
Lastly, returning to the goddess Orisha Yemoja, is the installation OMI: Yemoja Temple. Made in collaboration with architect Yussef Agbo-Ola and biologists Alex Jordan and Anja Wegner, from the Max Planck Institute, the installation creates a moving space that considers water as a spiritual and biological force.
Tabita Rezaire, OMI: Yemoja Temple (2024). Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
This installation is rooted in research the collaborators undertook in Tanzania, exploring ecosystems of Lake Tanganyika. For the exhibition, the collaborators have constructed a temple that is made in the shape of a water droplet, covered in indigo-dyed textiles. “I feel like science is catching up with ancient knowledge. Maybe it’s a different language but is seeking the same thing, but expressed in different ways,” she considered. “But sometimes there is a bridge, a connection,” she said of the collaboration. Throughout the exhibition, visitors have been invited at various points to participate in traditional offerings.
Rezaire has described herself as “child of water, a meandering spring that strives to become one with the ocean again” and here that life source becomes a potent, living force, that weaves together mysticism, biology, and sustenance, and offers new frameworks for seeing the world we inhabit.
“I am interested in an eternal truth…how people found language to express the same things. We go through the same things–the movement of planets, eclipses, the rising and full of suns, like cultures, and the growth of trees and spirit,” she said. “I am curious how we translated these into culture, into storytelling.”