looking outwards-09

Tabita Rezaire

Rezaire is a socially-conscious and anti-colonialist artist working in moving image and performative, experimental art. She attained a master’s degree from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design for her art practice and can be seen today composing thought-provoking performance pieces, jarring videos, and visceral net design. You need not look further than her website (https://www.tabitarezaire.com/offering) to get a strong idea of what she does. I admire her work because it has this absurdity in aesthetics (reminds be of Jacolby Satterwhite’s work) through purposely messy, dated graphic and net design mixed with straight-forward, but just as weird, language like “anti capitalist bae chasing the money,” “colorism kills,” and “pimp your brain” in her self portrait series INNER FIRE. This aesthetic culminates in a maximalist, sensory overload that forces the audience to at least interact with something that is present in her work. By doing so, audiences need to think about the countless junctures of social commentary Rezaire is expressing about. From beauty standards to the intra-capitalist rebellion necessary for marginalized groups in the hypercapitalist US state to the other-worldly, outer-space motifs that assert a futurism as a form of anti-colonialist rebellion (reminds me of similar aesthetic utilizations by music artist Sun Ra in his imagining of other worlds when colonialist oppression very apparently and concretely has taken that of black, brown, and Asian countries all around the world), her mission is both clear and effectively communicated through the clear desire of confrontation of the audience.