- Major acquisition by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma).
New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū) has had her monumental work 'In Pursuit of Venus [infected]' (2015-17) jointly acquired by by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma).
Reihana represented New Zealand in the 2017 Venice Biennale with the epic digital work, which reinterprets colonial history and the figuring of indigenous peoples as 'noble savages'. The work specifically refers to an 1804 French wallpaper by Joseph Dufour, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique–based on voyages of Europeans like Captain James Cook, the wallpaper cast native Pacific people as dressed in Roman-style clothing and with lighter skin tones. "It has so many dimensions,” says Nancy Thomas, Lacma’s senior deputy director of art administration and collections. "People of all ages can’t leave—they just sit down and they watch the whole project through, all 64 minutes of it… I watched children just sit and watch it very calmly,” she says.
The 'digital scroll' is 80ft wide, 13 ft tall and is accompanied by a soundtrack—a full 64 minutes. “It’s really captivating—the sheer scale and scope of the work is mesmerising,” says Claudia Schmuckli, the curator in charge of contemporary art and programming at FAMSF.
The work is due to be shown by FAMSF from 10 August to 8 December at the de Young, along with the original Dufour wallpaper and 18th-century engravings of Captain Cook’s travels to the Pacific, also in its collections. Reihana’s work is part of FAMSF’s commitment “to questioning dominant narratives, and integrating new and diverse points of view”, the director Thomas Campbell says in a statement, calling Reihana “a powerful voice in redefining history as we know it”.
More details about the acquisation can be read on theartnewspaper.com.