Omo Elu and Mother Trinity mark Tabita Rezaire’s shift from decolonial work of critiquing the matrix of colonial white capitalist hetero-patriarchy into a practice of mothering the world.
Omo Elu comprises indigo-dyed fabric panels that depict the Yoruba ocean goddess Yemaya, a manifestation of Rezaire’s relationship to Yemaya and to indigo – a plant used in colonial trade and grown by extractive enslaving force on the same land where she now cultivates it. The icons of the Mother Trinity tapestries correspond to the priorities of Amakaba, the sacred forest that Rezaire tends in the Amazon. At Amakaba, Mother Earth blesses the garden of medicines, dyes and food. Mother Moon blesses the birthwork, menstruation and yoga work Rezaire supports on the land. Mother Sun blesses Rezaire’s collective starwork, her portable planetarium that remembers an older astronomy.
Rezaire’s work is not about the concept of mothering or the goddess that blesses her work. Rather, it is a devotional practice of a mothering relation to the planet. Her tapestries, stitched by her collaborators – maroon women steeped in lineages of freedom and refusal – are documents of remembering what it might feel like to birth the world. To connect to this work requires surrendering your own colonial relationships – turning away from ownership and domination and toward everything that made your breathing form.
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Commissioned by Lagos Biennale, Nigeria, 2024 with the support of the French Institute of Nigeria and the Alliance Française, Lagos; Guyane Art Factory, Guyane; Castello di Rivoli, Italy; the Biennale of the Amazons, Brasil
With the additional support of Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and New York City
