Lisa Reihana

Lisa Reihana b. 1964, New Zealand Follow +

Lisa Reihana recently opened her most ambitious project to date at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. In Pursuit of Venus (infected) is a filmic animation made over six years. Projected across a panorama of screens, the lushly rendered film ‘reanimates’ the picturesque wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, popularised by 19th-century manufacturer Joseph Dufour.

The Auckland artist, who is of Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, and Ngāi Tū descent, repopulates Dufour’s fantastical exotic landscape with encounters between peoples of the South Pacific and early colonial explorers. The result is compelling, not simply for its high pixel count and unusual hybrid of animation and film, but its delicate portrayal of cross-cultural interactions, their wonderment and violence. In the following conversation, the artist discusses the work, her initial encounter with the wallpaper and process reimagining its images.

KBC: When did you first encounter Dufour’s extraordinary wallpaper and what was your reaction?

LR: About six years ago, there was a big Bill Viola retrospective at Art Gallery of New South Wales—it was really important for me to see this show. When I was studying at Elam in the 1980s, they had just set up the intermedia department and all the time-based materials we were interested in were only available as stills in books and slides. You never heard anything. And the internet definitely wasn’t around.

I flew to Australia to see Viola’s work and saw they had installed this wallpaper in another gallery. My partner and I stared at it and read the label, which said it was about the people of the Pacific. The piece was a marvel, but I couldn’t see the Pacific in it at all.

KBC: What did the wallpaper depict?

LR:

It shows gorgeous exotic peoples, but they’re quite neoclassical. I could see that it was attempting to reference wrapped tapa bodies, but it just didn’t look anything like the Pacific. Dufour presented a utopian Tahitian landscape. It is ‘nowhere’.

KBC: So you devised the project in Pursuit of Venus (infected) to animate this ‘nowhere’ landscape, populating it with seemingly authentic Pacific peoples, right?

LR: Yes, ‘seemingly’ with a big ‘S’. This was the issue I faced: how do you not exoticise something that is exotic? When you dress people up, wearing their finery, you cannot help but be drawn in. Anyone will know this from walking down Ponsonby or K’Rd [Karangahape Road] on a Friday night! So it took a while to figure out how to make this work. It’s not simply the issue of being exotic, but of inviting colonised people to partake a document that is like a colonising moment in itself.

KBC: The ‘document’ introduces a series of filmic vignettes that explore various encounters between Pacific peoples and Imperial explorers. These incidents clearly draw on Captain Cook’s voyages around the Pacific. Are the people that you represent here based on specific island groups and particular exploratory voyages, or do you mix different sources?

LR: This is where the whole notion of authenticity became really interesting. Shooting the project in Auckland was good because there are Pacific people from all over—Samoan, Cook Island, Niuean, for instance—many people that I could enlist. But these groups are also really mixed up, and this is true of the work itself. The scene where Cook is killed in Hawaii is actually played by Samoan actors. And Cook should be wearing a different naval uniform as he rises through the ranks on different voyages, but we’ve kept him as a single recognisable figure. This makes the question of authenticity such an interesting yardstick.

“It’s not simply the issue of being exotic, but of inviting colonised people to partake a document that is like a colonising moment in itself.

For me, it’s about being appropriate and trying to do the work with integrity. Much of my work has always been shot in a studio. I’ve always thought of myself as an image-maker and not an image-taker. In the studio, people know that I’m recording them. It’s not a fly-on-the-wall situation. It is an agreed representation.

KBC: Among the many diverse stories regarding the Pacific during this period, why did you focus on Cook?

LR: Because his death is actually in the wallpaper. But the representation is very small—there are two people on a beach and one has a gun, but it’s difficult to decipher that it is Cook. This is what I wanted to amplify. It is the only point in the wallpaper where you see the explorers, whereas the rest of the wallpaper is this purely exotic environment.

KBC: I’m interested in your approach to these encounters. Beyond juxtaposition, the piece includes layers and networks of imagery and narratives that encounter each other in interesting ways. There are curious, joyous, creative, and funny moments in these vignettes that can so quickly turn violent. Nothing is black and white: every moment of wonderment is undercut by jeopardy, and vice versa.

LR: In a way, I did use a strategy of dualities to mark and structure the layering. For instance, there is one flogging near the beginning—a crew member gets flogged because he has syphilis. Up close, you can see the blooms on his chest. But there’s also a flogging of an Indigenous person later in the piece. I included both stories to have a sense of symmetry, but more importantly, to expand notions of why these events happen. The second vignette is titled ‘Double Flogging’ because the local gets bashed by his mates for getting caught. It’s rough justice.

But nothing is obvious here. I hope that viewers always try to work out what is going on in this work like these historical figures would have. When you suddenly meet new people and new things happen, you have to decipher and make sense of the world yourself. There will always be layers of misunderstanding, which will happen for viewers too.

KBC: I want to ask you about the peculiar and extremely inventive filmic format the work takes. This animated landscape scrolls slowly from one side of the room to the other. It’s like viewers become passengers on a strange hybrid of a train and boat where you can watch this fantastical Pacific Island pass by. How did you come up with this structure?

LR: We developed an important technique because there is no ‘edge of frame’. The work scrolls to introduce the characters who enter the frame from the right-hand side and exit from the left. This is an atypical filmic language—there are no close-ups or focus shifts. The depth of focus remains at infinity, so everything is in focus from the front to the back, referencing to historic illustrations. I wanted to develop a way of looking in on a world and not quite ‘getting it’ all, but being intrigued by it, compelled. The immersive aspect of the installation was really important. As an audience member, you are a witness—you become part of it. —[O]

Main image: Lisa Reihana. Courtesy Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.