Public Reception and Celebration of Lisa Reihana: in Pursuit of Venus [infected]
Friday, April 29th, 2022, 6:00 PM
Join us for a public reception to celebrate the Bell Gallery’s current exhibition, Lisa Reihana: in Pursuit of Venus [infected]. Food and refreshments will be served indoors in the List Lobby, and masks are encouraged when not eating or drinking.
Lisa Reihana’s immersive installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015-17) transforms the Bell into a lush land and soundscape, one that reimagines 18th century European exploration of the Pacific as a cycle of colonial reinfection and Indigenous recuperation rather than singular moments of contact.
Emerging from her encounter with the 19th century French wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean), 1804-5 by Joseph Dufour et Cie, Reihana has transformed these utopian depictions of Captain James Cook’s voyages into surreal vignettes of curiosity, caution, desire, and predation.
By unfixing the Indigenous peoples of the original wallpaper from Eurocentric neoclassical fantasy, Reihana–who is Māori–allows for Indigenous agency both within the film and through her practice of “agreed representation” with actors and performers.
Visibility and its refusal are central to this project. The scrolling panorama of an imagined Tahitian landscape acts as an arena where gazes cross, meet, are evaded and recorded. in Pursuit of Venus [infected] challenges historic visual records, their narratives embellished and redacted, enshrined in the decorative wallpaper and scientific journals of the Enlightenment.
Projected across the Bell’s seventy-foot wall, this thirty minute film is on continual loop; beginning, middle, and end elusive within a wash of color and sound.
Lisa Reihana: in Pursuit of Venus [infected] is presented in conjunction with the major symposium Inheritance organized by the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University.
Inspired by the conversations that have taken place in response to the historic wallpaper Vues d’Amérique du Nord (Views of North America)—originally printed in 1834 by Zuber et Cie in France—in the center’s Nightingale-Brown House building, the symposium takes place April 27-30, 2022.
For more information, visit the
Inheritance symposium website
Brown University abides by public health guidance and health and safety protocols to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event, including current University policy regarding face masks and coverings. See the University’s COVID-19 Campus Activity Status page for the current policy for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
The Bell is open to the public daily 11:00 AM-5:00 PM and until 8:00 PM on Thursdays.