Lisa Reihana - Outakes

Lisa Reihana (b.1964, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Ngāpuhi-Ngāti Hine-Ngāi Tū-Te Auru) is among the most renowned contemporary artists from Aotearoa. Reihana expertly weaves together numerous threads drawn from western museology, archives, and history with the tikanga, mātauranga, and whakapapa of te ao Māori. Her extraordinary multidisciplinary practice encompasses video, photography, sculpture, and costume to question the ways in which identity and history are constructed, represented, and re-represented, and the conceptualisation of place and community.

Bringing together a diverse body of work made over several decades, Outakes acknowledges a particular aspect of the creative process; whereby numerous images and sequences are necessarily set adrift through the art of editing in the construction of narrative. Here, previously unseen stills and photographs are shown alongside more familiar series. Within this context Reihana breathes new mauri into these ‘out-takes’, demonstrating the artist’s creative kaupapa and ability to create engaging works in a perpetual state of whakarerekē.

A suite of lightboxes features hyper-bold images stylistically reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s cult 1982 film Blade Runner, extracted from Reihana’s dual-channel video Ihi (2020); an ambitious retelling of the Māori creation stories of Papatūānuku and Tāne. These are accompanied by three haunting stills from the evocative video installation Tai Whetuki - House of Death Redux (2015). Filmed at Karekare, a site where histories of war and death are embedded in the landscape, the work examines cultural practices pertaining to death, mourning, and the transition of the spirit, as goddess Hine-nui-te-pō guides the dead through the underworld where tangata and whenua are inextricably entwined.

Outakes positions those critical and creative energies inherent in both art and life – not in opposition to one another – but rather as part of a wider cyclical process of destruction and regeneration. “This feminine quality that births us, also guides us at death”, notes Reihana, who regularly casts wahine as protagonists in her storytelling, exploring the role and representation of women within cultural and art historical contexts. In an exuberant nod to western art history and the mythology of the white male artist, Reihana presents a brightly coloured series of Andy Warhol-esque style posters that tautoko the artist's Ngā Hau e Wha / The Four Winds (2009). This series occupies its own space in the gallery and features the artist’s iramutu and nieces as the wind goddesses te hau raki (northerly), te hau rāwhiti (easterly), te hau-ā-uru (westerly), and te hau tonga (southerly), adorned in contemporary kakahu from the collection of Te Papa Tongarewa.