Lisa Reihana
Tuesday 21 May, 2024
Elam Lecture Theatre 432-136, University of Auckland, 20 Whitaker Place, Auckland
About the lecture:
"...Art shifts, language changes… but the land remains..."
Many of the projects Lisa Reihana has worked on are responses to special sites, allowing her to hear and research local histories and the people who've shaped them.
Making pictures and telling stories is her business and pleasure.
Lisa will share insights on public projects, films, and exhibitions in this illustrated talk. Narratives rule and complex ideas abound, and she'll attempt to weave connections between various commissioned works, such as the Kura Moana installations by the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of Arts, Wellington; the built design of Tiramarama Way in Auckland; the permanent vide ihi showing in the Aotea Centre in Auckland and; Groundloop presented in Sydney Modern Atrium.
About the speaker:
Lisa Reihana is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, costume and body adornment, text and photography.
Since the 1990s she has significantly influenced the development of contemporary art and contemporary Māori art in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has earned an outstanding reputation as an artist, producer and cultural interlocutor with her attention to the complexities of contemporary photographic and cinema languages expressed in myriad ways.
Her ability to harness and manipulate seductively high production values is often expressed through portraiture where she explores how identity and history are represented, and the intersection of these ideas with concepts of place and community.
Reihana represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2017 with the large scale video installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015-17). The work premiered at the Auckland Art Gallery in May 2015 and has since become a seminal work in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history canon. in Pursuit of Venus [infected] has since been shown around the world and garnered widespread critical acclaim.
You can watch a feature of the work on Youtube here.
Other notable solo exhibitions include Mai i te aroha, ko te aroha, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand (2008); Lisa Reihana: Digital Marae, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2007); and Native Portraits n.19897, Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2007).
In 2014 Reihana was awarded an Arts Laureate Award by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, the Te Tohu Toi Ke Te Waka Toi Maori Arts Innovation Award from Creative New Zealand in 2015, and in 2018 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
For a full list of LIsa's work, awards and accomplishments, you can visit her website here
