A Pacific Panorama

Still from Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] at the Royal Academy, December 2018 © The Artist

The 250th anniversary of the first voyage led by Captain Cook to the Pacific has inspired a number of museums and galleries to stage exhibitions and new permanent displays (including of course Royal Museums Greenwich). The Royal Academy has chosen to focus on the rich arts and histories of the peoples that Cook’s crews encountered, and the many that came after them. Oceania looks thematically at Oceanic culture by mixing historic and contemporary works and is full of wonderful things.

I want here, though, to focus on one piece, which I think is easily one of the most thoughtful, beautiful and provocative artworks that I’ve ever seen. One whole room of Oceania is given over to Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected], an immersive digital work that runs for over half an hour. It is inspired by Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique, a spectacular 20-panel, enlightenment wallpaper designed by the French artist Jean-Gabriel Charvet and printed using the latest woodblock innovations by Joseph Dufour. The imagery was taken from, and inspired by, the accounts and images brought back from voyages led by Cook, La Perouse and Bougainville. The wallpaper was shown in 1806 in Paris at the ‘Exposition des produits de l’industrie française’ and was hugely influential in creating a particular view of Pacific peoples.

The wallpaper imagery created a particular romanticised, simplistic and ultimately racist European view of the Pacific. Reihana’s vast, panoramic digital recreation improves and subverts that imagery, by animating a series of stories of encounter, ritual, violence, and science from first-hand accounts. The title references the official purpose of Cook’s first voyage – to observe the 1769 Transit of Venus – but adds the slower ‘infection’ that the voyage brought to the Pacific, whether of disease, or ideas. 

Entering at any point in the narrative, the viewer watches the scene slowly unroll across the screen from right to left. Quiet moments of dance, craft and intimacy (on both the European and Pacific sides) are interspersed with moments of extreme tension, as islanders are killed, terrorised or repel sexual advances. But we also see moments of discussion and exchange, of objects, practices and ideas, from astronomy to tattooing. Set against a utopian Tahitian landscape, Reihana presents her stories with the help of modern Pacific performers, and with the sounds of historic objects that were part of the original encounters.

In its quiet but powerful, and visually stunning, scrolling narrative, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] brilliantly articulates the complexities of the histories shared by the Pacific and Europe, and encourages us to think about how those might be better understood and presented today.