10 Oceania


LISA REIHANA


Te audience watching In Pursuit of Venus (infected) at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, on a curved screen by Michael Young


Te talking-point of the Royal Academy’s


ambitious exhibition


Oceania opening later this month could well be Lisa Reihana’s (New Zealand, b 1964) In Pursuit of Venus (Infected), 2015-17. A 64-minute looped film that explores through animation and historical sources the clash of civilisations that occurred 250 years ago, when Captain James Cook arrived in the South Pacific. It is a total sensory experience that scrolls across a 24-metre wide screen. Te film explores Cook’s first voyage to


the Pacific – a journey that


eventually would lead to the subjugation of the Pacific Islander population. Shown recently in the New Zealand Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, the film is totally immersive,


mesmerising, and


overwhelming. Projected onto a flat screen measuring about three metres in height and more than 24 metres across, it is nearly double the original 33-minute version, which was shown in early 2015 at Auckland’s Art Gallery – and more recently at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art. Even before Reihana’s continued redevelopment of the video over the previous two years, the artist had layered some 60 vignettes of costumed actors, friends and students filmed against green screens, onto a monumental backdrop that scrolls continuously, right to left, using the early 19th-century panoramic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, (Te Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean). First printed in 1804–05, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique depicts Polynesian ‘Paradise of Enlightenment’


values, where


Pacific Islanders are seen in Hellenic poses, draped in Grecian inspired costumes, at a time when Europeans where fascinated by such unknown exoticism. Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique was the largest panoramic wallpaper of its time, depicting a fantasy landscape of bright colours and lush greenery featuring the people, events


ASIAN ART SEPTEMBER 2018


Lisa Reihana at the New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Biennale in front of In Pursuit of Venus (infected), 2015-17, in the show entitled Lisa Reihana: Emissaries (2017). Photo: John McIver


and places encountered during Cook’s exploration.


It was designed and


drawn by French artist, Jean-Gabriel Charvet (1750-1829) for the French company Joseph Dufour et Cie to grace the homes of wealthy industrialists. It is a highly stylised printed panoramic wallpaper crafted from dozens of woodblocks and gouache on paper – there are only five complete prints remaining and comprises 20,


2.5 metre drops,


making the full width of the wallpaper 10. 5 metres. ‘Te purpose of the enterprise is to please the eye and to excite the imagination’, wrote Joseph Dufour


(1754-1827) in the


promotional prospectus published with this panoramic,


or scenic,


wallpaper. It was first exhibited in Paris at the Exposition des Produits de l’Industrie, 1806. But the end product was a complete


fiction. Charvet had never been anywhere near the South Pacific and instead used as inspiration the hyperbolic and error-ridden reports authored by Cook as well as studying the illustrations by the prodigious botanist and plant collector Joseph Banks (1743-1820),


who


A still from In Pursuit of Venus (infected) 2015-2017 showing a British redcoat asking for a Pacific Islander woman


accompanied Cook on HMS Endeavour on the first voyage to the South Pacific (1768-1771). Banks on his return even wrote of Tahiti that the island was ‘the truest picture of arcadia (idyllic and peaceful)’. Te wallpaper was a concocted compendium of flora and fauna set against a landscape more reminiscent of the Caribbean and showed passive Polynesians happy to entertain and fraternise with the European adventurers. Rather than actuality, the wallpaper reflected European Enlightenment values rather than anything Cook and his men would have encountered in the Pacific. Reihana stumbled on the wallpaper in 2005 in Canberra at the National Gallery of Australia, where she had gone to see an exhibition of video work by American artist Bill Viola. ‘It is very unusual for the wallpaper to be on show because it is so fragile. But it was and it was really quite beautiful and supposedly represented peoples


of the Pacific. I could not recognise anybody’, Reihana told Asian Art Newspaper during a recent visit to Sydney. Reihana’s father is Maori and her mother Welsh. Having lived all her life in New Zealand, she identifies as Maori and her artistic preoccupations have for many years been focused on indigenous politics and on the stereotyping from which her people have suffered under the yoke of colonialism. Cook and Banks’ journals and


illustrations may have painted a picture of a paradisiacal idyll populated by primitive ‘noble savages’ , but the reality was quite different and would lead to misguided attempts at fraternisation,


many cultural


misunderstandings and the subjugation and suffering of indigenous people who were aesthetically creative and culturally sophisticated. original


wallpaper,


After seeing the she


knew


intuitively that she would use it to create a work correcting the early colonial inaccuracies that it portrayed. Using contemporary technology she would both reinterpret and reanimate the original.


Reihana talked about the more


than a decade it has taken to bring In Pursuit of Venus to the screen: hours of research in London reading Cook’s journals,


period uniforms, understanding


and a


tracking down copies of and critically, adapting


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