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A huge screen stretching across a large gallery space and playing across it on a single uninterrupted landscape a riff on the colonial experience. Sound familiar? To those who saw Lisa Reihana’s Transit of Venus (infected) it certainly might seem so, but in fact what we've just described is More Sweetly Play the Dance made by the white South African artist William Kentridge last year.
His video installation The refusal of time was shown at the City Gallery in Wellington and he is now the subject of a large survey exhibition in Berlin. More Sweetly Play the Dance is the final work in the show and there are certainly intriguing connections to be made with Reihana. Kentridge's work similarly features dancers, performers and musicians in a closed circuit world, but whereas Reihana used early nineteenth century French wallpaper as her backdrop, Kentridge has created a scumbled, eroded, black and white surface with no romantic or historical reference. On this backdrop his characters head purposefully across the screen in a macabre dance of death in contrast to the way time itself seems to draw Reihana's vignettes slowly and imperceptibly across our vision.
And then there's the action. While Kentridge's procession of African performers enacting those afflicted by disease, disaster and circumstance is legible to a fault, Reihana's characters play out their histories in the self-absorption of Arcadia. Kentridge's most propulsive element is the somewhat overwrought piece's discordant music featuring the same brass instruments the colonial invaders introduced as part of their military regime while Reihana's sound is both more contextual and low key.
The colonised experience dramatised from two distinct perspectives. Not hard to choose sides.
The selection of Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus [infected] to represent New Zealand at the 2017 Venice Biennale will come as no surprise to its curator Auckland Art Gallery Director Rhana Devenport. The Auckland Art Gallery already had a lot invested in the Reihana work and never has anyone put so much energy and lobbying power into an NZ Venice project. There must be a huge sense of satisfaction for Devenport who made it clear she thought the Reihana work was a slam dunk from the word go. Despite all that confidence, In Pursuit of Venus [infected] did have to climb over a few hurdles but as Creative NZ has already shown its rules and regulations when it comes to Venice are, to say the least, malleable. For all the talk of tweaking it into a new work, In Pursuit of Venus [infected] has been around for a long time in various iterations. To put it simply, it's unlikely that anyone who has seen the Reihana work in Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne or Singapore will not recognise it in its Venice outing. So CNZ 'commissioning' an additional suite of photographs as 'new accompanying work' to try and take the heat off the 'new' issue feels kind of unnecessary.
Unusually Reihana doesn’t have dealer representation at a time when dealers are expected to front up with cash and cashed-up connections, but with Devenport bringing the resources of the Auckland Art Gallery that's well taken care of. Still, if you pop your head out of the window in Auckland you'll probably catch a dealer or two racing by to offer their services.
This is the first time the director of a major metropolitan gallery has stepped up as sponsoring curator. It's the third time we have chosen women as both curator and artist and Lisa Reihana is the third artist of Maori descent to represent us. As for the Brian Butler list being so prescient, forget we ever mentioned it.
