Viewing Time and the Other: Visualizing Cross-Cultural and Trans-Temporal Encounters in Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected]

This essay analyzes the multichannel, synchronized video installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015–17) by Māori visual artist, filmmaker, and performance artist Lisa Reihana. The work was created as an indigenous response to the nineteenth-century French panoramic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The native peoples of the Pacific Ocean, 1804–05), designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet and manufactured by Joseph Dufour et Cie. Inspired by European exploration of the Pacific Islands region in the late eighteenth century, Les Sauvages presented consumers with a neoclassical pageant of newly encountered Pacific peoples existing in a utopian state of harmony with nature, but it also contained the incongruous depiction of the violent death of British explorer Captain Cook. Reihana’s contemporary revision proceeds from this rupture, critically recomposing and enlivening the wallpaper’s vignettes with actors and dancers to restage moments of cross-cultural interaction and conflict. Taking a dialogic approach that interleaves Western and Pacific theories and philosophies, the essay explores selected ways in which visual images are deployed within Reihana’s epic performance work. Key foci are how she tackles the biases of colonial imaging by exposing the indigenous possibilities encrypted within colonial visual texts, and her use of digital technology to visualize a Māori concept of time as a spiral that dilates with the viewer’s durational experience. in Pursuit of Venus [infected] furthers timely discussions about the role of digital technology and aesthetics in visual and performing art historiography, and suggests how critical reconfigurations of the past through visual and performative representations might stimulate indigenous self-determination.