Arebyte Gallery, a nonprofit organisation based in London since 2013 focusing on digital culture, each year outlines its programme based on a theme – this year dedicated to the home. Home becomes the metaphor for a centre we can return to once this extends towards the periphery. «Home is relational, emotive, nostalgic and warm, but equally can be impossible, scary and unstable. The artists in the program disrupt and confront the limits of what these situations mean in our present, our future and our digital homes».
This context is the framework for Satellite Devotion, Tabita Rezaire’s new installation, a work that overturns the gaze directed at the Moon which, in recent times, has been insistently galvanised by the desire to colonise space, re-directing it towards man himself to find once more his centre, his inner home. The Moon has always influenced a series of elements connected to Earth: the tides, but also history and individual feelings. Tabita Rezaire enters the orbit of everything which rotates around the Moon, from politics to meditation and healing.
Placed on a circular unit occupying the entire gallery space, twelve videos broadcast a constellation of lunar lessons, from astrophysics to cosmology, astrology, agriculture, healing practices, history, magic, meditation, theology and the politics of space. The installation consists of interviews made with twelve experts from these disciplines, who come from all over the world: a shaman from the Amazon rainforest, a traditional herbalist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, an astrophysicist from Guyana, the leader of the Druids and an expert in South African yoga. Their stories are accompanied by images of the Moon, viewed by the artist through her telescope.
The exhibition invites visitors to align themselves with Moon times and re-tune with their own centre through a gaze extended to all the senses. With this exhibition Tabita Rezaire inaugurates the Center for Moon Studies and Practices, a study centre for Moon knowledge, «to understand and experience the vastness of her influence and nourish our relationship with the Earth’s sole natural satellite». An exhibition, therefore, that launches a bigger project, a project aimed at knowledge, now more urgent than ever. Especially of the Moon, whose lunar landing anniversary is being celebrated at the moment, and whose influence guides our gaze once again towards Earth.
Tabita Rezare. Satellite Devotion, Arebyte Gallery, London, 02.07 – 24.08.2019
images: (all) Tabita Rezaire. Satellite Devotion, 2019. © Arebyte Gallery, photo: courtesy Christopher MacInnes
