Lisa Reihana

Lisa Reihana is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, costume and body adornment, text and photography.

Since the 1990s she has significantly influenced the development of contemporary art and contemporary Māori art in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has earned an outstanding reputation as an artist, producer and cultural interlocutor with her attention to the complexities of contemporary photographic and cinema languages expressed in myriad ways. Her ability to harness and manipulate seductively high production values is often expressed through portraiture where she explores how identity and history are represented, and the intersection of these ideas with concepts of place and community.

Reihana represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2017 with the large scale video installation in Pursuit of Venus infected. The work premiered at the Auckland Art Gallery in May 2015 and has since become a seminal work in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history canon.  in Pursuit of Venus [infected] has since been shown around the world and garnered widespread critical acclaim.