Week 5 - Practitioner - Cultural significance

Lisa Reihana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmMRF5nw9UI

Reihana's stunning 26-metre wide, 32-minute long installation animates and re-imagines the famous 19th-century decorative wallpaper 'Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique'.

https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/learn/for-educators/teaching-resources/venice-biennale/lisa-reihana-emissaries/introducing-lisa

http://www.inpursuitofvenus.com/

"in Pursuit of Venus [infected] is a response to the neoclassical French wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804–5) by Joseph Dufour et Cie and Jean-Gabriel Charvet. Comprising 20 drops of paper embellished with over 1,000 woodblock prints, Les Sauvages graced dining and drawing rooms across Europe and North America, creating site-specific immersive environments. It references the journeys of early French explorers and the three Pacific voyages of British explorer Captain James Cook. The wallpaper panels existed as an entertaining, quasi-educational travelogue for the wealthy. The popular wallpaper was an Arcadian fantasy that embraced Rousseau’s notion of the ‘noble savage’.

Reihana saw Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique in 2005 and was deeply affected by it, saying, ‘This fascinating wallpaper is a concoction, a fabulation invented in someone else’s elsewhere, and a technical marvel of its time.’

In response, Reihana recasts and repopulates a vast five-channel digital video with real and invented narratives of encounter between the peoples of the Pacific and Europe. Harnessing technologies, she reclaims and reimagines the original wallpaper from a 21st-century Māori and Pacific perspective.

The title in Pursuit of Venus [infected] plays with the notion of the filmmaker’s ‘point of view’ or ‘POV’. The Venus that the artist references alludes to both the international search to measure space and time by documenting the 1769 transit of Venus and Europe’s romantic conception of the South Seas.

Reihana introduces the death of Cook in Hawai‘i as the dramatic moment of rupture within in Pursuit of Venus [infected]. Yet this drama and the other 80 vignettes play out within an endlessly looping visual world that scrolls from right to left every four minutes. The space is multi-dimensional and time is cyclical, referencing Pacific thinking about time and space that unifies nature, the mind, and reality in an eternal state of exchange." https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/learn/for-educators/teaching-resources/venice-biennale/lisa-reihana-emissaries/introducing-lisa

detail of In Pursuit of Venus {[infected]