The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

143 ARTISTS in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (still, details) 2015–17 Single-channel Ultra HD video, 64 minutes (looped) 7:1 sound, colour, ed. 2/5 / Purchased 2015 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Appeal and Paul and Susan Taylor / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / Photographs: Norman Heke / Images courtesy: The artist Lisa Reihana Ngā Puhi, Ngāi Tu, Ngāti Hine Born 1964, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Auckland Working across film, video, photography and installation, Lisa Reihana creates powerful contemporary expressions of Māori history, culture and traditions. in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015–17 is Reihana’s most ambitious project to date and offers a highly innovative reframing of colonial imagery of indigenous peoples. The installation reimagines the French panoramic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Savages of the Pacific Ocean) c.1804–05, designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet for the French entrepreneur Joseph Dufour. The 20 panels of these scenic papers depict scenes derived from observations made by Captain James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville during their voyage to the South Atlantic and South Pacific in 1768–71, the subsequent engravings of John Webber and William Hodges, and accounts of Cook’s death in Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i, in 1779. Reihana’s title refers to Cook’s presence in Tahiti during the 1769 transit of Venus across the sun, an event that precipitated his expedition to ‘claim’ the ‘unknown’ Terra Australis. Cook’s survey of the South Pacific islands, the west coast of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia would ultimately lead to their violent settlement. Cook’s reports of pre-colonised life laid the foundation for Charvet’s utopian renderings of Oceanic societies that adorned the rooms of American and European estates. They conflated locations and historical moments with neoclassical characteristics — the imagery is replete with clothing discovered in the ancient city of Pompeii, the physicality of Hellenic sculpture, and Enlightenment-era desires for ‘dusky maidens’ and ‘noble savages’ in landscapes of exotic flora and fauna. in Pursuit of Venus [infected] seeks to counter (or corrupt) this portrayal by introducing the living traditions and cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples. The video comprises more than 65 vignettes featuring Māori, Polynesian and Aboriginal performers, community elders and cultural practitioners engaged in live performance and re-enactment. The scenes, shot on green screen and digitally composited, scroll across an immersive landscape. We glimpse moments of intercultural communication and trade, along with customary practices (a Kava ceremony and Hawaiian mourning ritual), episodes of brutality (the flogging of a sailor), and humour (botanist Joseph Banks’s attempts at seducing a Tahitian woman). For Reihana, the background becomes an open space and: . . . a platform that anyone can stand on, because it’s not specific to anywhere . . . I wanted to do a complete reversal. Not just take back our Māori/Pacific cultural practices and reclaim those, but the landscape too. 1 After six years of extensive research, the first iteration of in Pursuit of Venus [infected] was presented in 2012 as a two-channel video at Amsterdam’s Museum Van Loon. Following an additional period of development in which Reihana worked with Dharawal dancers and weavers in Sydney, new scenes of Indigenous Australia were included and the work was presented as a five-channel panorama at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The work’s cycle was also extended to introduce a more complex point of view, with different versions of similar events incorporated into the final edit, and Cook cast with both male and female performers. In this final version, Lisa Reihana’s startling video presents itself as an elaborate reclamation of land and culture, opening up a visual space that disrupts any singular or comfortable understanding of the legacies of empire, navigation and intercultural encounters. José Da Silva Endnote 1 Lisa Reihana, quoted in Megan Tamati-Quennell, ‘Reverse notions, darkness and light’, Public , vol.27, no.54, 2016, p.75.