Tabita Rezaire: Healing Through Art at the Intersection of Technology and Spirituality
Antakly Projects · In Conversation
Tabita Rezaire
Artist · Healer · Cayenne, French Guiana
Network sciences as healing technologies. Downloading truth directly from source.
Why this conversation
Some artists make work about the world. Tabita Rezaire makes work that tries to heal it. I wanted to sit with someone who treats technology and spirituality as the same conversation, who calls the network a healing system and means it literally. What stays with me is her refusal of a single story about what is real. She grew up between two worlds, the Western education and the intimate, ancestral one at home, and rather than choosing she decided to hold both at once. That is a rare and demanding kind of generosity.
The work
Tabita Rezaire was born in Paris in 1989 and is based in Cayenne, in French Guiana. She is an artist, but also a healer, a Kundalini yoga teacher, and what she calls a health-tech-political therapist. Her practice moves across video, immersive installation and collective offerings, treating digital, bodily and ancestral memory as sites of resilience and repair. She reimagines network sciences, organic, electronic and spiritual, as healing technologies, and through screen interfaces she reminds us to open our own inner data centres, to bypass Western authority and download directly from source.
She did not grow up in a spiritual household, though both her parents are therapists and healers run through both sides of her family. It was Kemetic yoga, an ancient healing system with roots in Egypt, that finally aligned her creative and spiritual lives and carried her through a dark period. It also turned her art from diagnosis toward cure. "Instead of focusing on the diagnostic and symptoms, I was now searching for remedies," she says. "My art practice became a medium to share this blessing."
Technology is like a knife. It can be used for murder or to carve a beautiful figure, depending on whose hand is holding it.
The digital, and its double
Her relationship with the digital is clear-eyed. She knows how social media manufactures disconnection, comparison and insecurity, and at one point she stepped away from it entirely, an act of self-liberation that brought her closer to peace and gave the work more purpose. In pieces like Sorry For Real she imagines a future in which the West makes amends for the violence of colonisation. Elsewhere she honours the overlooked contributions of Black culture and refuses the version of history that dominates Western books. Her art does not only critique. It offers a path toward wholeness.
"When you allow yourself to build a relationship with your wounds, to go where it hurts and come back from it, you grow," she says. Those lessons are visible in the work, which asks us to look into our inner worlds and our collective suffering while offering a way to move through the pain rather than around it.
A child of water, a meandering spring that strives to become one with the ocean again.
In her own words
I am interested in an eternal truth, in how people found language to express the same things. We go through the same things: the movement of planets, eclipses, the rising and falling of suns, like cultures, and the growth of trees and spirit. I am curious how we translated these into culture, into storytelling.
Growing up in France and being Western educated made me notice the contradiction with what I was exposed to in private, intimate spaces. The Enlightenment, those philosophers who built the Western cosmological vision, is only one way of seeing the cosmos. There are so many other ways that are as valid and as potentially true.
My journey is one of radical inclusivity. Can I be the mountain? Can I be the river? Can I be the forest that I am in? Can I be the land? Can I be my whole lineage? Widening one's sense of being to include as much as one is capable of holding can radically change the way you interact with the world.
In motion
Selected exhibitions
- 2024Calabash Nebula, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
- 2023Fusion elemen.terre, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse
- Centre Pompidou, Paris · Museum of Modern Art, New York · Tate Modern, London
- Represented by Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg · shown with Arebyte Gallery, London
Further reading
You might like
Thank you, Tabita. See more of her work on her website.
Tabita Rezaire, Des/astres (2024). Courtesy of presented by TBA21 at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
