The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Some original tenets of photography, such as veracity and truth, have long been scuttled through refinements to technology. Photography is now so deeply embedded in both our personal and public lives that it seamlessly merges with our sense of the real and, in some instances, displaces it. The photochemical ‘trace’ of the real, to which theorists Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss and Susan Sontag have referred, has been displaced by the code and data of digital imaging technologies, while the medium’s conflation with other technologies has confirmed it as a global medium of unprecedented reach and penetration. Together with photography’s siblings — film and video — history is now seen in terms of cinematic narrative, documentary footage, television broadcasts and frozen archival moments. It is this familiarity with the language of historical and significant moments that infuses Greg Semu’s photographs with an evocative power. Semu’s orchestrated tableaux, adapted from both historical events and art history, are paradoxically brought into the realm of the photo-document despite their pre-photographic origins. His borrowing and adaptation of historical events and images is endowed with the veneer of reality through the very artifice of the medium. Semu’s reclaiming of history is a kind of reversal of photography’s original impetus — the technical artifice is constructed to verify the event. Semu’s works in APT7 are drawn from two series of commissioned photographs. The series ‘The Last Cannibal Supper . . . cause tomorrow we become Christians’ 2010 dramatically appropriates and re-contextualises the doctrine of Christianity; these images deploy Christian iconography to address the religious and political colonisation of indigenous Pacific populations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Auto portrait with 12 disciples directly quotes Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth-century mural The Last Supper in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan. Semu inserts himself into the image as Christ surrounded by Kanak tribe members from Noumea. A suckling pig graces the table in this subversive tableau, which confronts the Christian concept of transubstantiation, while tribal cannibalism and the notion of the ‘savage’ are proffered as symbolic tropes of a pre-Christian culture. The typology of the Pietà is adopted in La Pietà de Villeneuve-lés-Avignon , in which Semu refers to a work by fifteenth-century French painter Enguerrand Quarton (Musée du Louvre, Paris). The roles of the protagonists — the Virgin with the dead body of Christ in her lap, St John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene and the kneeling figure of the donor — are all assumed by Kanak men and women, and the drama unfolds amid traditional woven mats and clothing. Here, the mourning for the dead Christ can be seen as a eulogy for a lost and displaced culture. An earlier series, ‘The Battle of the Noble Savage’ 2007 also draws on art historical imagery — particularly the genre of history painting — and is a response to a 2007 poster for the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Union team, produced and gifted to the museé du quai Branly to commemorate the World Cup and the team’s tour of France the same year. The poster depicted the All Blacks performing their signature haka in a tropical rainforest. Semu’s riposte to this stereotype of the ‘primitive’ was to orchestrate a series of fictitious battle scenes, both reinforcing the image of the Maori as a warrior culture, at the same time as redressing a colonial history. Untitled (from ‘The Battle of the Noble Savage’ series) is an elaborate digital montage in which Maori warriors are posed in battle against a backdrop of native forest. Central to the image is an equestrian portrait which quotes a suite of heroic paintings by Jacques-Louis David of Napoleon Bonaparte astride a rearing horse. 1 Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass , more commonly known as Bonaparte crossing the Alps , is a work that merges the genres of portrait and history painting and, here, Semu has enlisted Maori extras to ‘play’ additional roles in his take on this well-known painting. 2 Semu has referred to his appropriations as attempts to ‘try to synchronise the Maori land wars with the same historical period as the Napoleonic and Prussian wars’. 3 This strategy works to decentralise a Eurocentric view of history by acknowledging the parallel history of the Maori nation. While born and raised in New Zealand, Greg Semu claims Samoa as a ‘spiritual home’, 4 and has approached his own past and the history of his people from the position of a culturally displaced observer. For Semu, the potential of the photographic medium for the creation of elaborate fictions provides a means to re-present and reinterpret remnants of his cultural history. David Burnett 1 Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass is the title of five paintings completed between 1801 and 1805, originally commissioned by King Charles IV of Spain. The four variants of the original painting were painted by David and his workshop; differences between the works may be found in the colour of the horses and Napoleon’s cloak. 2 Other works in Semu’s series draw on early colonial paintings by Louis J Steele, Nicholas Chevalier, Walter Wright and Charles F Goldie. 3 Greg Semu, interview with Reuben Friend for the exhibition, ‘Oceania: Imagining the Pacific’, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2011, see <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOx8VXbKMoo >, viewed 11 September 2012. 4 Semu, interview with Reuben Friend. GREG SEMU History and artifice GREG SEMU New Zealand/Australia b.1971 Untitled (from ‘ The Battle of the Noble Savage’ series) (detail) 2007, reprinted 2012 Digital print on PVC canvas, light box, ed. of 10 / 150 x 250cm / © musée du quai Branly, Paris / Photograph: Greg Semu / Image courtesy: The artist and Galerie Metropolis, Paris 196