Lisa Reihana
New Zealand
Born: New Zealand 1964
Lisa Reihana, photo: Anna Briggs
Biography
Lisa Reihana (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tūteauru, Ngāi Tūpoto) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, costume and body adornment, text and photography.
Born in 1964 in Aotearoa New Zealand, Reihana lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Since the 1990s she has significantly influenced the development of contemporary art and contemporary Māori art in Aotearoa New Zealand. During that decade and the early 2000s, Reihana was part of a series of seminal exhibitions in New Zealand that carved out a space in the visual arts for an expanded representation of Māori identity and expression. Ever since, she has claimed digital technologies and virtual space as one where innovation meets tradition. As Reihana remarks, ‘I seized upon twenty-first century technologies because they sit outside traditional rules, the photographic process came from there, it replaces the wood and I use the computer as my carving tool’.
Reihana’s work explores colonisation, gender and representations of Indigenous peoples across media. She often looks to how stories of the past are told or those points in the past that have been overlooked, weaving mātauranga Māori through her technically ambitious and poetically nuanced work. Her art-making is driven by a powerful connection to community which informs her collaborative production method, grounded in working kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face).
Reihana represented Aotearoa New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2017 with a large-scale video installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] 2015–17. In 2020 she was one of the artists commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to create work for the Sydney Modern Project, the transformation of the institution into a two-building art museum campus. She has created a monumental moving-image work, GROUNDLOOP, that overlooks the central atrium of the Art Gallery’s new building. Set between Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, this dazzling sci-fi tale forges a new story of trans-Tasman connection built upon deep histories of encounter and exchange.
