23/04/2022
A highlight of the is the New Zealand pavilion by the Yuki Kihara’s ensemble entitled Paradise Camp, curated by Natalie King.
“Yuki, being the first Pacific, Asian and Fa’afafine artist to represent Aotearoa at the prestigious Venice Biennale, has gifted the New Zealand arts community with an incredible moment to cherish.” says the Minister of Culture.
Located in
in the Arsenale, Paradise Camp comprises twelve tableau photographs featuring a cast of Sāmoan Fa'afafine (Sāmoa’s third gender’), repurposing and upcycling selected paintings by the late post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin.
Inspired by the faleaitu (house of spirits) skits performed in Sāmoan culture, Kihara also casts herself as Gauguin in Paul Gauguin with a hat (After Gauguin). In this ingenious role reversal, Kihara is transformed via silicone prosthetics, costume, moustache and wig.
Shot and filmed on location in Upolu Island, Sāmoa, Kihara’s performative photography is presented against a vast wallpaper of a landscape decimated by the 2009 tsunami, and alongside First Impressions: Paul Gauguin - a five-part talk-show series commissioned by Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen in 2019, where a group of Fa'afafine comment wittily on select Gauguin paintings.
The exhibition features a “Vārchive” – a term coined by Kihara that uses the Sāmoan concept of Vā to describe her relationship with her archive of research.
The artist says, “My Vārchive includes personal research, rare books by 19th century explorers, colonial portraits, pamphlets, news items, a geological sculpture, activist material and visual links between Gauguin and Sāmoa. It provides a backstory or a living story of how Paradise Camp came into being. Through this, the archive doesn’t become storage for dead information but rather a living entity that helps to provide new meaning in the present and what it might mean in the future.”
Text from images by me!
