Lisa Reihana is a contemporary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her multidisciplinary practice—encompassing film, photography, sculpture, costume, body adornment, and text—examines how identity and history are constructed and represented, and how place and community are conceptualised.
Read MoreBorn in 1964 in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau, Lisa Reihana gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts (1987) and a Master of Design from School of Visual Art and Design, Unitec Institute of Technology (2014).
The Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, and Ngāi Tū artist is a core member of Pacific Sisters. The Indigenous collective emerged in Auckland in the 1990s, bringing the lives of a New Zealand-born Pacific generation into the mainstream through fashion and performance.
Reihana represented New Zealand at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Her large-scale video installation in Pursuit of Venus infected reexamined European narratives of colonisation in the Pacific with a focus on Joseph Dufour et Cie's 19th-century wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean).
'On the [original] wallpaper is a whole series of imagery based around Pacific people, and I wanted to create a correction about that work. So it's not just a film about encounters, but an encounter for the audience,' says Reihana. '[The scene] just didn't look anything like the Pacific. Dufour presented a utopian Tahitian landscape. It is "nowhere",' the artist told Ocula Magazine.
in Pursuit of Venus [infected] was shown at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa as part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts in 2022, for which Reihana was the artist in focus.
Reihana is the recipient of the 2014 Arts Laureate Award by Arts Foundation of New Zealand, the 2015 Te Tohu Toi Ke Te Waka Toi Maori Arts Innovation Award from Creative New Zealand, and has been a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit since 2018.
Private and public collections holding her work include Te Papa Tongarewa; Auckland Art Gallery; Australia National Gallery; Staatliche Museum, Berlin; Susan O'Connor Foundation, Texas; Brooklyn Museum, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; AGO, Toronto; de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
Lisa Reihana's work has been shown in North America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand.
Notable exhibitions include Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry (2021); Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; MARKK Museum am Rothemburg, Hamburg; Duolun Museum of Modern Art Centre, Shanghai; Sydney Biennale (all 2020); Sharjah Art Foundation, U.A.E.; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki: Auckland (both 2019); Royal Academy, London; Te Papa Tongarewa: Wellington (both 2018); The Walters Prize 2016, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2016); Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam (2013); Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2011); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); and Asia Society Museum, New York (2004).
The artist lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Lisa Reihana is represented by Page Galleries.
The artist's website is here.
Text courtesy Page Galleries.
