Voyager, an exhibition of works by acclaimed Māori artist Lisa Reihana, distorts and reimagines time, space and myth. By Patrick Lau.
A troop of roos hangs out in a dry riverbed, fossicking for interesting bits of grass, at the bottom of the drive that leads up to Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery. These roos are cool like James Dean is cool. As cars approach, they’ll bound away but not in the melodramatic way your typical kangaroo might. They’re more sullen, disaffected, like a teen secretly thrilled to be caught smoking. It’s quite a thing to see the lope of an insouciant roo.
At the top of the hill, by the car park, a ramshackle stockyard hunches over a fresh-sprouted patch of sparkling new solar panels. Down the fenceline is a paddock with some rambunctious calves harassing their mothers, little white flashes zooming around with distinctly un-bovine energy.
On the other side of the ridgeline are the pastoral grounds of Retford Park, the country estate of the late James Fairfax. The Victorian mansion itself is discreetly tucked away behind copses and hedges, glimpses of its “Portuguese pink” (really, it’s more salmon) flashing through the treeline.
Ngununggula (“belonging to the people” in Gundungurra language) comprises the old brick dairy and vet shed of Retford Park, donated by the National Trust through the James Fairfax Foundation, and opened to the public in 2021. A timber-facade entrance annex has been slapped on the side of the main building, designed by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer. It’s giving repurposed barn – less Country Living cover, but it’s not too twee. If you shop at a farmers’ market, it’ll feel like coming home.
Lisa Reihana, whose work featured at the New Zealand pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is the first international artist to hold a solo exhibition at Ngununggula. The project, Voyager, features a collection of recent video art from Reihana’s library, along with some photography and a few other items.
Chief among these is a new site-specific piece, designed to respond to Ngununggula and its milieu and named after it: Belong. Reihana’s art, particularly commissions such as Belong, are often driven by location and context, and by the meeting of artefacts and people in those places.
The work is an installation spackled across the gallery’s exterior, with hundreds of reflective metal discs woven together in a pattern that emulates the tāniko weaving found on the fringes of Māori kākahu (cloaks). The zigzags or chevrons represent the arms of warriors performing a haka, or the mountains and meeting places of the Southern Highlands.
When the wind is up, the discs ripple and shimmer; when it’s still, the outlet of the air-conditioning system flutters part of the installation, like condensation dripping down the side of the building. The effect is of a gallery gussied up in tinsel, ready to host a party.
This disc-weaving technique is relatively new for Reihana, who is best known for her video art. She has also deployed it in Glisten (2024), a recent piece for the National Gallery of Singapore, as well as in a new work for Sydney Contemporary.
Here’s an axiom: there’s only two types of story. In the first, someone leaves on a journey. In the second, a stranger comes to town. Of course, both of these are the same story, told from two different perspectives. Voyager embraces this idea and makes it central. Many of the works here are reimaginings or retellings of myth or new perspectives on history that shift the viewpoint to enrich the narrative.
That approach was present in Reihana’s Venice work, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015), in its techniques as well as its concerns. Venus took a 19th-century French wallpaper and remixed it into a panoramic video, retelling the story of European colonisation of the Pacific with a shifted gaze.
Like that work, Voyager is referential and even reverential of other forms of depiction, both their modes and media, as well as the phenomenology they embody. Reihana has an obvious broad appetite for forms of art and is a listener to stories as well as a teller of them.
Māramatanga (2024), for example, is a video of dancers representing ancestral figures that references carvings in a meeting house at Auckland University and features performers from the dance school there. The characters turn like figurines in a virtual music box, while the backdrops of natural images – sea, forests, waterfalls fractalised and kaleidoscopic – recall the patterns on tukutuku panels, also used to decorate meeting houses.
The cinematography of the works here is striking. There are religious elements, both in the sense of a spiritual tendency but also in the treatment of iconography and artefact.
Then there’s GOLD_LEAD_WOOD_COAL (2024), a panoramic video commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong. The work explores the story of a 1902 shipwreck off the coast of New Zealand. The ship was carrying the bones of 500 Cantonese goldminers, which washed up onshore and were ceremonially cared for and buried according to Māori custom.
The cinematography of the works here is striking. There are religious elements, both in the sense of a spiritual tendency but also in the treatment of iconography and artefact. Curious depth-of-field choices and weird angles create a sense of vertigo.
It’s a cosmically funky feeling, akin to the experience of distorted metaphysics – the feeling that gravity and time are warped – that’s generated by staring up at painted cathedral ceilings, or by wuxia films – Reihana admits to a love of kung fu movies.
Oddly, it brings to mind the films of Zack Snyder. It’s also reminiscent of the artist Marco Brambilla’s video for the Kanye West (Ye) song “Power” (2010), although both of these references are likely a case of convergent evolution rather than direct inspiration: big mythic figures translated from static panels into something kinetic.
There’s an AI-composed video doing the rounds you may have seen. Van Gogh, double-eared and joyful, steps out of a self-portrait and mugs like a man in a commercial for hearing aids. Vermeer’s milkmaid and woman with a pearl necklace join him for a picnic in the park, posing for selfies and indulging in some confusing throuple-ish embraces. Their fingers shiver like squid tentacles. The milkmaid pours milk endlessly. The video itself is kind of great but it’s emergent, an undirected happy accident arising from the Brownian collisions of ones and zeros.
Reihana’s CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN – A REVERIE (2020) has a similar aesthetic but the intentionality behind it is visible. This work is a panoramic screensaver, a biography of the shoemaker told through objects he’s designed, collected or been affected by. A kaleidoscope stiletto floats and rotates like a sacred relic, limned by a mysterious golden halo: a Tarantino-esque moment, in more ways than one. The piece itself – as well as the man it lionises – is gaudy, sensational and fascinating.
Lisa Reihana: Voyager is showing at Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery until November 9.
