Still from Virus SS 16 by Bogosi Sekhukhuni
In Tabita Rezaire’s Afro Cyber Resistance, 2014
Courtesy of the artist
TABITA REZAIRE ON BOGOSI SEKHUKHUNI
Still from Virus SS 16 by Bogosi Sekhukhuni
In Tabita Rezaire’s Afro Cyber Resistance, 2014
Courtesy of the artist
Tabita Rezaire
Afro Cyber Resistance, 2014
Single channel video, 18 min 26s
Image courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery South Africa
In 2014, I woke up to the grim reality of the Internet as an apparatus of coloniality. I wrote the text “Afro Cyber Resistance,” which was later disseminated as a video. Inspired by the practices of CUSS GROUP and Bogosi Sekhukhuni, who used the Internet as material for cultural dissent toward western hegemony, I wanted to celebrate artistic political resistance online. From technological and political critic to African pop cultures, scientific imaginaries, and a sharp sense of style, I learned from and with them the power images have to reshape our globalized contemporaneity. We later became family and built further community engaged in technological and existential emancipation. I am so grateful for their presence and influence in my life. In reverence or disobedience, we walk and grow through the realms of bots and trolls, CBD demons, and airport vortexes. May we thrive as we claim agency as advanced technological beings, consciously resisting co-option—internalized or imposed—from White, reptilian, heteronormative patriarchal imperial power structures. May the harvest of our struggle for epistemic liberation be glorious and the fruits of our labor of love abundant.
REZAIRE, SEKHUKHUNI