Emissaries

The Arts Council of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa is proud to present Lisa Reihana as New Zealand’s artist for the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. In Lisa Reihana: Emissaries, imperialism’s gaze is returned with a speculative twist that disrupts notions of beauty, authenticity, history and myth. The exhibition unravels Enlightenment ideals, cartographic and scientific endeavour, and the raw, ever-present impulses of expansionism, power and desire. Lisa Reihana: Emissaries features the artist’s vast panoramic video in Pursuit of Venus [Infected], 2015—17, alongside interrelated photo-based and sculptural works. In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] is a cinematic re-imagining of the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages De La Mer Pacifique, 1804—1805, also known as ‘Captain Cook’s voyages’. Two hundred years later – and almost 250 years after the original voyages that inspired them – Reihana employs twenty-first century digital technologies to recast and reconsider the wallpaper from a Pacific perspective. Enlivened with the sights and sounds of performance, cultural ceremonies and encounters, the expansive video panorama is populated by known and invented narratives of encounter amongst the British navigators and astronomers and people drawn from across Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific. Expanding and contracting scale, Reihana presents portraits of two key figures from in Pursuit of Venus [Infected] as emissaries: the Chief Mourner from the Society Islands who moves between worlds, and Joseph Banks, the ambitious naturalist/astronomer who documented the Transit of Venus on Cook’s first voyage. Meanwhile, a constellation of sculptural works literally telescope in on moments of encounter and wonder. Lisa Reihana: Emissaries is presented at Tese dell’Isolotto, one of the oldest structures in the Arsenale di Venezia, and a space imbued with its own history of emissarial action. Lisa Reihana (b. 1964) lives and works in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Reihana (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu) is at the forefront of experimentation and has helped forge time-based and media art in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her technically ambitious and poetically nuanced work disrupts gender, time, power and representational norms. Reihana’s work spans film, sound, photography, spatial design, live-action, costume and sculptural form. Her art making is driven by a powerful connection to community which informs her collaborative working method described as kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face). Her work has featured in significant museums and major exhibition projects including Global Feminisms at Brooklyn Museum, the Yinchuan Biennial, the Havana Biennial, the Noumea Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Adelaide International at Samstag Museum, the 12th Biennale of Sydney, the 2nd Auckland Triennial at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, the 2nd and 4th Asia Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific at Asia Society Museum, New York, Suspended Histories at Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam, imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival, Toronto, The Trickster at Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, South Korea, and Toi Toi Toi at Museum Fridericianum, Kassel. Reihana’s work was recently included in the inaugural Honolulu Biennial 2017, a multi-site, contemporary visual arts festival. Reihana has undertaken numerous international residencies and commissions, was made an Arts Laureate by the New Zealand Arts Foundation in 2014, and received the Te Tohu Toi Kē Te Waka Toi Māori Arts Innovation Award from Creative New Zealand. She was shortlisted for the Signature Art Prize at the Singapore Art Museum in 2014 for in Pursuit of Venus; as well as for Double Take, the Anne Landa Award, Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2009 and The Walters Prize at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2008, both for Digital Marae. She was shortlisted for The Walters Prize 2016 for in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015. Reihana was named a 2017 Distinguished Alumni by the University of Auckland, in recognition of her outstanding achievement in the field of fine arts. Reihana completed a Masters in Design from the School of Visual Art and Design, Unitec in Auckland in 2014 and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1987.

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Arsenale

Venice, NY