Acclaimed Artist Lisa Reihana Exhibits in Adelaide

In partnership with the Adelaide Festival, the Samstag Museum of Art unveiled four dynamic exhibitions in February including one from New Zealand-born artist Lisa Reihana.

Reihana’s panoramic video ‘In Pursuit of Venus [infected]’ subverts a 19th-century French wallpaper that mapped the voyages of Captain Cook in the South Pacific. It was the most acclaimed work from the 2017 Venice Biennale and it’s presented in its complete, original form.

According to The Adelaide Review, ‘In Pursuit’ “is one deep and most curious rabbit hole”.

“On entering Reihana’s ‘In Pursuit of Venus [infected]’ you are wrapped in an immersive experience well outside the realm of conventional cinema,” according to the Review. “This is No-Where Land where multiple human dramas are enacted by actors who, are, at once, figments of history and as real as the nose on your face. They look to have burst through a proscenium curtain of arcadian desire, like the actors they are, hamming it up and clamouring for attention. The challenge is, there are so many of them, disposed as vignettes across a 20-metre screen, which one moment are here and, at another, reappearing there.”

Born in 1964, Reihana is of Ngāpuhi descent. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1987, and completed a Master of Design at Unitec Institute of Technology.

‘In Pursuit of Venus [infected]’ is on until 5 April.

Original article by Clare O’Brien, Broadsheet, March 19, 2019.