Lisa Reihana’s immersive panoramic video installation
Lisa Reihana’s panoramic video installation 'in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015-17' is based on the French panoramic wallpaper 'Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Voyages of Captain Cook)' 1805, designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet for the French entrepreneur Joseph Dufour. In creating this early European representation of the peoples of Oceania during first contact, Charvet was inspired by Captain James Cook’s 1769 voyage south to witness the transit of Venus across the sun and the subsequent search for ‘Terra Australis’. From a Polynesian, Māori or Aboriginal point of view, Charvet’s imagery relies more on an Enlightenment-era imagination than truth.
Reihana’s high-definition immersive vision creates a stage for complex cross-cultural encounters, as she turns the tables on the flat, generic green plains of the original wallpaper design which conflated Oceanic locations with European Neoclassicism. The work shows contemporary indigenous performers, community elders and cultural practitioners engaged in culturally specific acts and ceremonies - including dance, storytelling, tattooing and trade - that are both playful and subversive. Meanwhile, actors playing the British seafarers observe, misunderstand and disrupt daily proceedings.
The panoramic nature of Reihana’s multi-screen, surround-sound projection ensures the audience’s point-of-view is that of a tangata whenua (person of the land). This viewpoint ‘infects’ the representations found in these fanciful nineteenth-century wallpaper designs, in effect confining them to the distant past.
Lisa Reihana, Nga Puhi, Ngai Tu, Ngati Hine, New Zealand b.1964 / in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015-17 / Single-channel Ultra HD video: 64 minutes (looped), 7.1 surround sound, colour / Purchased 2015 with funds from the QAGOMA Foundation Appeal and Paul and Susan Taylor / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Lisa Reihana
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia
https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/
© Queensland Art Gallery Board of Trustees, 2017
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