by William Kherbek // Feb. 17, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Wellness.
Tabita Rezaire’s art practice has explored the ways in which healing and the longing for healing define the human experience. Her works are determined to engage subjects and lineages that unsettle historic understandings of power and knowledge. From the appropriation of the cellular body of Henrietta Lacks—a Black woman whose cells were harvested by Johns Hopkins University doctors in the 1950s and which continue to be used in research—to the healing potential of the ancient form of the stone circle, Rezaire’s work has challenged the ways in which forms of restorative knowledge are deployed and the cosmologies that underpin them. Addressing subject matters as broad and overwhelming as the enduring specter of coloniality in digital culture or as intimate as dietary regimes for womb health, Rezaire’s vision is a capacious one, one that mandates a level of presence and engagement that few artists today are prepared to attempt, let alone sustain. In speaking to her about her understandings of the faultlines between healing and wellness, between liberatory and scarcity logics, her thoughts reflect the encompassing vision that defines her works. We began by speaking about her recent exhibition in Berlin and the way that knowledge is positioned within and beyond it.
Tabita Rezaire and Yussef Agbo-Ola: ‘Omi Libations,’ 2024, installation view in project space of the Schering Stiftung, Berlin // Photo by Jens Ziehe, courtesy of Tabita Rezaire, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
William Kherbek: Your exhibition at the Schering Stiftung with Yussef Agbo-Ola, ‘Obi Libations,’ addressed how different forms of knowledge production or stabilization interact with each other. Your work frequently touches on the ways in which knowledge is “allowed”—or disallowed—to be known. Could you talk about these relationships in that work specifically?
Tabita Rezaire: One thing that is central in my practice and life is the attempt to peel off the hierarchies of power inherited from the colonial system: the hierarchies between people, between genders, between races, between knowledge systems that intersect in the way we love, the way we learn, the way we work, the way we eat, the way we allow ourselves to live in the world, the way we care for each other, the way we relate to each other, to the visible world, to the invisible world and what is considered important, meaningful, valuable and what is not.
For me, growing up in France and being western educated, made me notice the contradiction with some of the things I was exposed to in private intimate spaces, as in: “Ah, ok! I guess there are two worlds out there.” What’s important for me is that the Enlightenment—those philosophers that created the western cosmological vision—is just one way of seeing the cosmos or interacting with or understanding the universe. There are so many other ways that are as valid or as potentially true. The European framework tries to assert its power and domination, and it tries to erase or demonize or delegitimize other ways of being, other ways of living, other ways of understanding life or truth. It made everything else untrue, or “folklore” or “legends.” That’s one battle of mine, or form of advocacy, that I wish to pursue: to bring other ways of being and living and understanding and relating and caring as potentials for existence.
You mentioned the historical erasure of non-western narratives, non-western sciences, systems of imaginaries in science and philosophies. In a more mystical tradition or another branch of praxis, I believe that some information or knowledge is not meant to be known by all. In a lot of cultures, there is an initiation process that takes the people of the communities through certain depths of knowing with time and age. The elders are the ones who know the most and that’s why eldership has such a revered place in society, because they know more. They have access to more depths of understanding through their experience, but, also, different rituals and practices that allowed them access to known information that the rest of the community may not have access to. And that’s a form of hierarchy, in a way, but one that preserves the safety of information. It’s like an encryption system, that only a few may have access to certain information. So it’s anti-democratic, if you like, but it has another function, that of protection. And that’s also a form of care, because placing all information in hands that may not be able to carry that information or do the best with that information can also have negative consequences.
You also mentioned knowledge production. I remember when I was in Senegal with an archaeologist and he said something that really stuck with me. He said: “you know the west talks a lot about knowledge production? Here, it doesn’t exist; knowledge can’t be produced, it can only be cultivated. You allow it to reveal itself, but you cannot produce it.”
Tabita Rezaire: ‘Premium Connect,’ 2017, single-channel video, 35mm / 16mm, HD, color, sound, 16:9, film still // Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
WK: In thinking about knowledge revelation and dispersion, a lot of contemporary notions of wellness speak about “being informed” or proclaim access to specialist knowledge, but it comes at a price. Healing information is a commodity. Often your work is concerned with distributing or recovering knowledge, often about the body, one might think of “womb consciousness,” as discussed in ‘Sugarwalls Teardom.’ In that instance there is actual dietary advice and it culminates in a meditation. I wonder how you see the ways in which healing knowledge may be “protected” as distinct from the ways modern wellness discourse may seek to commodify it as a proprietary object.
TR: I’m going to say something that’s not politically correct. I don’t see a firm line between healing logics and proprietary logics. It doesn’t seem to me like an economy that I’m into. Healing, it’s a force, and it can come through any door, anywhere. You can be farming and it happens, you can be paying millions for it, if you need to. These are just the containers, but you find yourself in a situation where something flows and something shifts and you experience a release from pain that you were never able to before. And, if that’s your way, that’s your way. There are so many ways: talking to your grandma or neighbor, or a women’s circle or therapy. People pay their therapists, and there is a lot of healing that can come in that container. There are ways for everybody. Some may need to go to a mountain and meditate and be on their own, or someone might need to be in a community for a ritual or be cared for by an elder or ancestors. There are so many points of access. One way of understanding healing is to create a space of safety where you can drop into your wounds and face them and feel like you’re not going to crash. Often, we push these things under the rug because they’re too frightening, and you think: “If I go there I’m never going to come out.” Feeling safe is very different for different people.
I feel like I’m a storyteller; there’s something I want to share, and often it comes in the form of an experience. In ‘Sugarwalls Teardom,’ I wanted to make space for the contribution of Black women in the history of science but also in the urgency of the healing of our wombs, the history of gynaecology and the violence of it. Maybe the balance for me is how I mix histories of violence with the idea that there is still a door or a pathway for healing or care. How can we nurture ourselves beyond the trauma that we carry and that we inherit and re-enact and we may pass on if we don’t do the work? I guess that’s the balance. I want to address the pain and the suffering we carry and come through, but, at the same time, I believe, I know that there is a way out. We can get through life and the things that are painful to us and make us small.
Tabita Rezaire: ‘Sugarwalls Teardom,’ 2016, film still // Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
WK: You speak of healing as a force. My mind here turns to the title of the Albert Ayler composition ‘Music is the Healing Force of the Universe.’ You don’t often get asked about music in your work. How do you think about the music you feature or include, especially in relation to concepts such as healing?
TR: For me, I differentiate between sound and music. Let me say that I think sound is everything, and everything is sound. A human being is like a song walking around, and we are all playing our own tune, maybe in a disharmonious key, or maybe off key, but sometimes everything aligns and it’s honey. We learn how to tune the songs of our being that reflect how we relate to other songs and other things, the cacophony.
In many traditions, cosmologies and cosmogonies, the creation of the universe is a sonic event: sound put creation into motion, and everything comes through that original primordial sound. The waves of sound are still propagating, still creating, the original impulse of creation is still manifesting in everything that’s created from that original sound. That song is being played in front of us, always. How can we tune ourselves, our little song, to this cosmic sound? That is the aim of existence, but can we hear it? Can we actually hear it? Maybe sometimes, but most of the time, no, so we have to recalibrate our being.
Tabita Rezaire: ‘Mamelles Ancestrales,’ 2025-26, installation view at Selebe Yoon, Dakar, Senegal // Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
WK: This notion of recalibrating ourselves, tuning ourselves, speaks to the ways in which forces and bodies interact. Healing and wellness discourse often speak of reconciling body and mind, attuning them, perhaps. There is often a distinction made between mind and body in healing processes, some artistic approaches are very centered on the mind in addressing these ideas, but yours is unafraid of focusing on the body as well. Could you discuss the way you think about this kind of porosity between body and mind?
TR: I work on a farm now called Amakaba and the idea is to think in three dimensions: earth, body and sky. All the time I’m imagining these as three circles: how would they be drawn? The cosmos is in the body, but the body is in the cosmos, too. The earth is in the body, and the body is of the earth. We can think about it in so many different ways, but the question of the body is about sanctuary because the body holds the memory of our whole lineage of our entire experience, and since we cannot digest or metabolize all of this, things get stuck in tensions and pains. The body crystallizes our suffering. Through the body we can disentangle this. It’s not the only way, but the body is essential because we are an embodied species; our whole experience is mediated through the body, it’s how we connect.
My journey is one of radical inclusivity, and that’s frightening, but I ask: can I expand myself, my understanding, my own embodiment and my sensitivity of being? Can I be the mountain? Can I be the river? Can I be the forest that I’m in? Can I be the land? Can I be my whole lineage? Can they all exist within me? When I care for the thing that is me, what is it? It’s my whole community, the whole country, the whole world, and that practice of widening one’s sense of being to include as much as one is capable of holding in oneself can radically change the way you interact with the world.
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
Selebe Yoon
Group Show: ‘Im/mobile’
Exhibition: Nov. 29, 2025–Feb. 28, 2026
selebe-yoon.com
rue Salva et rue Parchappe, Dakar, Senegal, click here for map
