The moving in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015 by Māori artist Lisa Reihana is the focus of the QAGOMA Foundation 2015 Annual Appeal / 4 channel HD video, 32 minutes (loped), 5:1 Sound, colour, ed 2/5
A striking and immersive moving image work by renowned Māori artist Lisa Reihana has been revealed as the focus of the 2015 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Foundation Appeal.
QAGOMA Foundation President, Tim Fairfax AC said that the 2015 Appeal is aimed at complementing the Gallery’s existing holdings of contemporary Pacific art by raising funds to acquire the ambitious four channel video.
‘For the 2015 Appeal, we turn our attention towards the Pacific and the captivating video, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015 – Lisa Reihana’s most ambitious work to date. Six years in the making, this contemporary masterwork transforms static historical images into a deeply moving retelling of history, giving a fascinating insight into Māori and Pacific culture in the 1800s,’ Mr Fairfax said.
QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM said the important work was inspired by a nineteenth-century wallpaper produced c.1804 by popular French wallpaper and fabric manufacturer Joseph Dufour & Cie. The wallpaper pattern called Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique drew on various sources, including the exploratory journeys of Captain Cook, to depict actual and invented scenes drawn from everyday life in early-1800s South Pacific. These are rendered in an extraordinarily complex 1,000-block relief print, stencil and hand-painted process across 20 individual ‘drops’ totalling 2.5 metres high by 10.5 metres across.
‘Two hundred years after these scenes were first depicted on the Dufour wallpaper, Reihana’s contemporary reimagining takes the form of a mesmerising and immersive multi-channel panoramic video spanning four screens.’
‘By bringing to life the characters in the original wallpaper through this contemporary performance, Reihana’s video restages and reclaims these historical stories with an informed critique of colonial representations of the time.’
The 2015 Foundation Annual Appeal was launched at the Queensland Art Gallery on Saturday 9 May. Over 80 guests came together to hear the artist in conversation with QAGOMA Director Chris Saines and Maud Page, Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions, and to experience the moving tableau as it premiered at the Gallery.
in Pursuit of Venus [infected] will be on display at the Queensland Art Gallery until early 2016. For more information or to donate, please visit our website .
Lisa Reihana was awarded the 2014 Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand with in Pursuit of Venus [infected] hailed as a major departure. A version of the work was recently nominated for the prestigious Signature Art Prize. Reihana regularly exhibits in group and solo exhibitions, most recently at Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand (2011), and the Plug Inn Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada (2011). Works by the artist are held in private and public collections including Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Australia National Gallery, Canberra, and the Staatliche Museum, Berlin.
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Filling the intimate space of Gallery 6 of the Queensland Art Gallery, the compelling soundscape of the QAGOMA Foundation’s 2015 Appeal artwork beckons. Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015 heralds visitors into a dynamic space which re-examines the story of Pacific exploration and encounter. This new perspective excites the imagination, populating this history with living, breathing peoples and their culture.
Reihana’s work is familiar to the Gallery, having featured in the ‘The 2nd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT2) 1996–97, ‘The 4th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT4) 2002-03 and Maud Page’s New Zealand collection survey ‘Unnerved’ (2010). A striking detail from her ‘Digital Marae’ series also currently flies on banners facing the Brisbane River outside the Queensland Art Gallery building. Further afield, Reihana’s work has been shown in the Sydney Biennale and in Singapore, New York, Toronto, Paris, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Taiwan and Rome.
Acclaimed as one of the most accomplished multimedia artists of her generation, it is no surprise that Reihana’s most recent and ambitious work is one of artistic and technical mastery. Such terms, however do not describe how warm and wondrous this work is. Upon entering the space where in Pursuit of Venus [infected] pans in Ultra High Definition across four widescreens, it is impossible not to be drawn into the work’s complex layers of embodied narrative, sound and movement, to become engaged with the characters and their experience.
As the structure for her 32-minute video work, Reihana takes an immensely popular early nineteenth century European artefact, the expansive panoramic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique (c.1804) designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet for French entrepreneur Joseph Dufour. Dufour’s wallpaper was the largest of its time, stretching over 10 metres in length and some 2.5 metres high in twenty separate ‘drops’ or panels. Designed to completely encase a room, Les Sauvages transformed the room of a wealthy European or American estate into a Tahitian idyll, replete with Indigenous peoples in the midst of celebrations or preoccupied with the rhythms of everyday life.
Some of Charvet and Dufour’s inspirations are immediately apparent and, moreover, explicitly documented in Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique, tableau pour decoration en papier peint, Dufour’s prospectus for the wallpaper which was published before its manufacture. Charvet extracted scenes of indigenous life and narratives of encounter from the records and journals of explorers such as James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, situating clusters of detailed figures within a vivid and lush landscape of exotic flora and fauna. The wallpaper’s figures, set in familiar Hellenic poses and outfitted in Grecian drapery, followed a widely-favoured neoclassical style that echoed Roman murals then being unearthed in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Popular Enlightenment thought espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other writers of the time situated the indigenous communities in Les Sauvages within the utopian environment of the dusky maiden and noble savagery.
In a conversation with QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM and Maud Page, Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions, Lisa Reihana recalls being shocked on first seeing the wallpaper on display at the National Gallery of Australia: ‘I couldn’t see anything that I recognised.’ Inspired to bring the wallpaper ‘to life’ and invest Les Sauvages with more complex understandings of indigenous culture at the moment of their encounter with an outside world, Reihana launched a monumental six-year project of painstaking research, planning and technical design.
The result, in Pursuit of Venus [infected], recodes Dufour and Charvet’s wallpaper, reclaiming the identities of both its ‘noble savages’ and European colonists through the use of digital technologies within a carefully rendered landscape that recreates Charvet’s original bright aesthetic. Over 65 vignettes incorporate performances of dance, ceremony and history from across the Pacific through a contemporary lens. Reihana casts graduates from Pacific Institute Performing Arts (PIPA), Auckland, and from across Pacific communities. Careful, collaborative attention to clothing, tattoos, choreography and scripting asserts each character in her work with undeniable liveliness. Reihana reflects:
As a filmmaker, the value that you bring to the work is just to re-enact it, and to show it again, so that we can decide how we think about these things. That’s what I want to bring to the audience. You become the witness. You become the person on the land looking out and seeing these things happen. … Imagine what people felt.
in Pursuit of Venus [infected] had its Australian premiere at the Queensland Art Gallery on 9 May, where it was revealed as the subject of the 2015 QAGOMA Foundation Appeal. Director Chris Saines, introducing Lisa Reihana as the evening’s special guest, situated the work in its contemporary context:
For me, it is already among the most art historically and culturally well-informed multimedia works that I have encountered. I have no doubt that it will stand among the most visually and conceptually sophisticated works of its time.
The launch of the 2015 Appeal saw Foundation members, donors and guests captivated as Reihana’s work panned beautifully across the screens. To close the fascinating in-conversation session Reihana invited everyone to join in a stanza of the traditional Scottish ode to departures and returns, ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean’, a song which resonated hauntingly with the remarkable, immersive experience of in Pursuit of Venus [infected] at the Gallery.
To support the 2015 QAGOMA Foundation Appeal or for more information, visit the Appeal webpage. Contributions of all sizes are welcome and those over $2 are tax deductible. Contributions of $4000 or more qualify donors for Foundation membership and support from existing Foundation members will be credited to their memberships.
For further news and information about the 2015 Appeal, including footage of Lisa Reihana’s exclusive in-conversation session during the Appeal launch, stay tuned to the blog.
New Zealand-born artist Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected] is the subject of the Foundation’s 2015 Appeal. Gallery curator Ruth McDougall spoke to the artist about the work and the inspiration behind it.
Ruth McDougall (RM) You were a member of the influential 1990’s performance group Pacific Sisters. Performance, and particularly the performance of a contemporary Pacifica identity, was important in the work of a number of New Zealand-born artists during this period. Can you talk about this period?
Lisa Reihana (LR) Pacific Sisters founding members were Selina Forsyth, Niwhai Tupaea and Suzanne Tamaki. My introduction was via Selina, who was a pattern cutter and seamstress for the Mercury Theatre. We were all based in inner-city Auckland and worked in creative fields, and the Sisters formed at an exciting time — part of a movement reinventing ‘urban indigenous’. Many of us hailed from mixed-up ancestry, and this was a safe place to compare notes on such things as Pacific history, sewing and handcraft skills. Working with the Sisters offered kinship in its collaborative approach and shared learning — beauty and brains. Rosanna Raymond and Suzanne Tamaki were young mothers, so besides the sharing of cultural knowledge, we shared childcare — there was much laughter, love and yummy food. And of course everyone was gorgeous and proud of their DNA. There were male ‘sisters’ too, marvelous musicians such as Henry Taripo, Karlos Quartez, Brother J — sexy, groovy and loud, you couldn’t help but notice when the Pacific Sisters arrived. Our contemporary approach wasn’t always acceptable as we challenged tradition, spun yarns and busted open notions surrounding what Māori and Pacific practice could be.
RM What was it about the Dufour wallpaper Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique c.1804 in particular that inspired you to use it as the trigger for this work?
LR I was at Hyde Park Art Centre, in Chicago taking part in the Close Encounters project. Within HPAC is the Jackman Goldwasser Gallery with 10 videowhich projectors create a 10 x 80 inch panoramic screen. As a multi-channelfilmmaker I so wanted to make something for that space. The gallery has itsown unique challenges and technical characteristics; it’s able to be seen bothday and night, as well as close-up or at a distance from across the road. Sowhen I was searching around for ideas that would suit the set-up, I recalledJames [Pinker] introducing me to Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique on showat the NGA in Canberra . . . Hyde Park’s video gallery suddenly made bringingthe panoramic wallpaper to life seem possible. I could see the potential, andhave spent the last six years bringing that vision to life.
I wanted to . . . present real Pacific peoplesengaged in their own ceremonies — herewe are . . . living, breathing and beautiful.
RM The use of performance continues to play a key role in your work and in your newest four-channel video in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015 it is the mechanism used animate nineteenth century representations of Pacific peoples, allowing contemporary descendants to speak back. Can you talk a little bit about the types of representation you are responding to in this work?
LR Les Sauvages claimed to represent indigenous peoples, but like many things, it is a mirror of its time. Entrepreneur Dufour accompanied the wallpaper with a prospectus that included some very disparaging remarks about some races. The characters clothing was influenced by the discovery of Pompeii — hence their dress of wrapped tapa and feather bindings has strange approximations that are more like togas with ribbon detailing. I wanted to re-animate the wallpaper to present real Pacific peoples engaged in their own ceremonies — here we are . . . living breathing and beautiful. Not only is there a shift in the representation of the indigenous peoples, but the background moves too, it is a mesmeric slow pan that shifts the very ground, destabilising the foundation it is based upon. And as a viewer, you are posited as tangata whenua — the local people, so in Pursuit of Venus [infected] allows you to stand for a while in someone else’s shoes — the original land owners or the harbingers of colonisation. Like any business or organisation, this project has an acronym, too: In filmic terms, ‘POV’ is the shortened form of ‘point of view’ . . . and these slippery notions take place throughout the video work.
RM You have in the past been described as a story teller. What are the stories that you want to share with audiences of in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015?
LR I scoured Anne Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas (2003) and NickThomas’s Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain Cook (2004), wonderingdeeply about the encounters between peoples of different geographies andcultures. The value of re-enactment is to physically see it, and as a filmmakerthis is something I am able to do. When iPOV is projected, the scale brings animmediacy to history — it’s no longer a line on a page but something embodiedand visceral. As there is little dialogue in the work, the audience mustdecipher what’s going on, much like the historical characters as they livedthrough these cross cultural communications and miscommunications. I’mof mixed descent and am the camera on the shore and the explorer, witnessto the events and daughter of the oppressed and oppressor. Sometimesit’s the smaller details that grab me. In thinking about early tattoo culture,such famous symbols like anchors were tattooed on European bodies by theTahitian Arioi; and artists made their own relationships without the safetynet of armed Marines by their side. There are over 65 vignettes in this work,hopefully everyone in the audience will have something they can relate to,ponder on or at least be left with a sense of wonder.