Sugar Walls Teardom

Tabita Rezaire researches technology politics, the legacies of colonialism, and methods of self-actualization by connecting ancient knowledge systems with new technologies and quantum physics through, among others, spiritual technologies such as Kemetic yoga and sound healing. In her installation Sugar Walls Teardom, exhibited at AB6, she explores how bodies, and the womb especially, have been exploited historically and continue to be subjected to control exerted by the medical-legal-industrial complex through today. The work comprises a pink gynaecologist chair and points to medical research conducted on unconsenting enslaved women, such as the series of experiments the Alabama surgeon Dr. J Marion Sims performed on enslaved African women between 1845 and 1849. Rezaire’s examination chair celebrates the contribution of Black women’s wombs in the history of science. According to the artist, nature and the womb are the original technology, yet colonial and capitalist exploitation have caused a disconnection between the body and the self. Sugar Walls Teardom addresses the exclusion of Black women from the dominant narrative of technological progress and the simultaneous exploitation of their bodies for so-called scientific achievements.