Lisa Reihana | Cinemania
‘Cinemania’ is the first Australian survey of Aotearoa New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre from 12 January to 29 March 2018
Featuring three decades of video and photographic works that reveal the full spectrum of Reihana’s oeuvre, the exhibition charts the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the complexities of cultural identity, unpacking ideas surrounding cultural mythologies, imperialism and the politics of representation.
The survey includes early experimental works in digital video such as Wog Features, 1990, a single channel film that addresses sexist and racist distortions of cultural history, revealing the power of images and words in perpetuating (mis)identity. The futuristic film Fantastic Egg, 2002, presents a dystopian imagining of the implications of technological development, while Pelt, 2009, confronts viewers with a series of uncanny photographs staging hyperreal female subjects in icy otherworldly spaces. Poised between states of human and non-human, these hybrid women hover in the gap between life and death. Also on display is the colossal panoramic video In Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015—17, which premiered at the 57th Venice Biennale. Almost ten years in the making, this work reimagines and animates the French colonial scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 1804—1805, from a trans-Pacific perspective, incorporating scenes from Campbelltown’s local Dharawal community. A vast landscape populated by indigenous Pacific peoples and British explorers recalibrates colonial history by challenging the European gaze, disrupting notions of beauty, authenticity, history and myth.
Together, the subjects of Reihana’s alternate worlds inhabit liminal spaces in which boundaries between past, present, and future collapse, carving open a space for identities to transgress everyday expectations of cultural and social norms.
EXHIBITION
Lisa Reihana | Cinemania
12 January – 29 March 2018
Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown
I met with Gary Deirmendjian in his studio, or one aspect of it at least, at a café in Sydney’s Kings Cross. He is self-described...
Adam Douglas Hill (AKA Blak Douglas) is an attention-seeking artist. Seemingly on the fringes of the art world but also something of a celebrity whose...
With the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney recently announcing the reintroduction of admission fees from February 2025, there has been a renewed...
The colonial spasm that started in the seventeenth century, that saw the world carved up to fuel capitalism and created a socio-political landscape that led...
On his visit to Australia in 1968 the American art critic Clement Greenberg encouraged young artists to “enjoy their diversity”—advice Jock Clutterbuck appreciated. As a...
Here are brief segments pulled from fieldnotes that emerged from the beginning of the first two weeks of my fieldwork in the rural town of...
Bathurst has inspired the exhibition yet it’s not an exhibition about Bathurst. My mum grew up there. My grandparents and uncle had a farm there,...
The typical arc of a mid-career retrospective exhibition is that of an artist arriving at a fully formed artistic style. But this major exhibition is...
It’s not as though the national attitude toward acts of terrorism was more permissive in the past. Thank you very much, 2006, in which footage...