Over the past five hundred years, the colonial imagination has placed Indigenous bodies in positions that are pleasing, romantic and noble. By exerting power and maintaining control over the gaze, this practice debilitates Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination. In this installation, Māori artist Lisa Reihana actively resists such static misrepresentations of the past and present in a video work that explores issues of identity, gender, and colonial violence. Conceived as a response to the 1800s wallpaper Les sauvages de la mer Pacifique (pictured below), this monumental installation brings to life Māori and Pacific Indigenous people’s relationships with their cultural knowledge and spaces. Although the wallpaper was said to represent Pacific landscapes and peoples, it was completely fictional, a mash-up of flora, fashions and people from other times and places. Reihana reimagines the wallpaper as a “panoramic pantomime,” creating historical and imagined scenes with Indigenous actors accompanied by a rich soundscape that includes dialogue in many Pacific languages.

Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival

Lisa Reihana was born in 1964, Auckland (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū), and lives and works in Auckland. Reihana represented New Zealand in 2017 at the Venice Biennale with in Pursuit of Venus [infected].

Reihana has an extensive exhibition history including her solo exhibition Native Portraits at MLAC, Italy; Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum; the Asia-Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia; the Liverpool Biennale, UK; Pasifika Styles, Cambridge, UK. Digital Marae, shown at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth in 2007, was shortlisted for the Walters Prize 2008 and Anne Landa Art Award, AGNSW, Sydney.