In another Issue 48 highlight, writer Neha Kale meets the renowned Māori artist Lisa Reihana to discuss how the history of colonisation has informed her work and the alternative worlds she conjures. This is a still from the artist’s 2015 video work, Pursuit of Venus [Infected], which Kale explains is “based on Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804), a panoramic wallpaper designed by French painter Jean-Gabriel Charvet that recreates Captain James Cook’s voyage to the Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s”. For Reihana’s multivocal retelling, Pacific Island and First Nations performers recreated more than 80 vignettes from the story, with the aim of evoking what the artist terms the “feeling of what it was really like to be there”. Purchase the issue here to discover more.
