transforming maori futures: lisa riehana's mediation of relational postures toward the past in the present

"In their voyages across the Pacific, the star navigators followed (and still follow) the pathways of their star ancestors, finding new lands to inhabit. Their canoes seem to stand still in the sea as the islands sail past." Anne Salmond

Writing of Kupe, a Māori navigator and ancestor who followed Venus from Ra'iātea to Lisa Reihana's homeland in Aotearoa, anthropologist Anne Salmond invokes the Tongan concepts of tā and vā which Tongan art historian Hūfanga 'Okusitino Māhina applies broadly to the Pacific. 

Tā and vā, or time and space, are conceived as circular in nature and the basis for Pacific thinking of the past, present and future, wherein "people are thought to walk forward into the past and walk backward into the future, both taking place in the present, where past and future are constantly mediated in the ever-transforming present" (Māhina 2010). Kupe, looking back on and following ancestral routes, found future lands to inhabit.

Lisa Reihana is a contemporary Māori artist whose practice is one of walking backward into the future as she looks upon challenging Eighteenth and Nineteenth century histories and charts new pathways through these histories using Twenty-First century technologies. Three works of art by Reihana conform with Pacific concepts of tā and vā and her manipulation of embodied physical space with digital technologies transforms the object/viewer relationship in the present. By altering our "relational posture"(Barnett 2011) with the past in the present, Reihana rewrites future potentialities.

Relational Posture

In her essay "Relational Objects: Connecting People and Things Through Pasifka Styles," curator Anita Herle focuses on a "relational understanding" of the connections between people and things. Within the idea of a relational dynamic is the assertion that individuals and objects acquire meaning via their relations. This evokes anthropologist Lissant Bolton's idea that in addition to a focus on the agency of things, "we also need to understand the forms of relationships in which things operate" (Bolton 2001).

Archeologist Mary Weismantel, in her research on the stones of Chavin in Peru echoes this idea by adding spatial context to the materiality and agency of objects; Weismantel suggests that spatial relationships and physical interactions, or kinesthetic movement, are intrinsic to the social history of objects. Herle goes on to say that a focus on relationship creates opportunities for "museum collections and exhibits to link people and ideas over time and space" (Herle 2008).

"The lived perceptual processes by which we encounter the world" (Massumi quoted in Barnett 2011) are "what we abstractly see when we directly and immediately see an object, lived relation-a life dynamic. We are seeing the actual form 'with and through' that set of abstract potentials" (Massumi 2008). This echoes anthropologist Alfred Gell's discussion on the role of the mind in creating agency, intention and causation when he says that something "is possible because intentions cause events to happen in the vicinity of agents[1]" (Gell 1998).

Cassandra Barnett, a Pacific art historian, works on this idea of causation and delves a bit deeper into the embodiment of agency and Massumi's lived relation by illustrating for us what actually happens when intentions cause events with the apt example of a chair. We not only see a chair as an object, but also see our potential (or intention) to walk around it or sit upon it, thus lending it agency.

It is our body's "relational posture," derived from prior experience, that we feel in connection to an object or artwork (Barnett 2011). It is this relation, mediated by embodied feeling, that provides us with an affective experience.

Without the relational posture discussed by Barnett - using our seen and felt potential for interaction with a chair as described above - I would argue that the visitor's lack of a relational posture in connection to objects or artworks in a museum renders the them mute, or nearly so, with an agency or life dynamic that is reduced to the quality of aesthetic form or classification as special.

Our interaction or relational posture with a chair involves not merely a felt or embodied relationship with it, but the imagined potential for movement through space with and around the chair. This felt rather than seen movement is what habituates our senses and perception to create a relationship and a lived dynamic. Massumi calls this "relational aliveness" (Barnett 2011) a "semblance" that creates our awareness of an object's agency (Massumi 2008). An object's likeness or "semblance" to a prior lived experience is what we see when gazing upon an object and sensing a relational posture.

As a contemporary artist, Lisa Reihana's multiple uses of our relation to semblance in her installations create a lived dynamic with her Māori culture and the Pacific colonial past. Her work in the Digital Marae series operates on the level of semblance and triggers relational postures, creating layers of likenesses that for Barnett culminate in "A greater perceptual event emerging from all those competing likenesses to sacredness and sovereignty and commerce and colonization. It's a perception of what it's like to be alive on marae space: a space whose purpose is to gather past, present and future lives together, and keep family and connectedness alive" (Barnett 2011).

Digital Marae 2001

At its most sacred and traditional, the marae is a ground on the property of a kin group with a meetinghouse as the focal site of ancestral veneration. The house "is conceptualized metaphorically" (Walker 1992) as the body of the ancestor and a gathering of kin within the ancestral house is "said to be a meeting within the bosom of the ancestor" (Walker 1992). Steven Hooper counters Walker by saying that the house-as-body is not a metaphor but an actuality for the Māori, who believe the house is the body and Alfred Gell, referencing Roger Niech, suggests that the meetinghouse does not "memorialize" the ancestor, but "reinstates" him in another form (Gell 1998). For the Māori, Entering the mouth (doorway) of the ancestor, one passes from the current world into a spiritual domain.

Carved poupou within the body of the ancestor represent his descendants along with other images of gods and heroes, all displayed in a very specific manner. The architectural configuration of buildings on the marae carries a spiritual order that delineates the sacred (tapu) and profane (noa) with strict protocols for activity within the entire space. Following colonization and the resulting fragmentation and urbanization of Māori as a people and the loss for some of the sacred marae and meetinghouse, the term marae has acquired a contemporary meaning that encompasses any location that Māori meet to exchange greetings and engage in communal support and Māori cultural enrichment.

Within the gallery, Reihana reconceives the sacral marae both physically and virtually and engages in the full articulation of Māori social, and sacred values. The entire physical space becomes an embodied, penetrating experience, dominating visitors with larger than life photographic representations of reimagined ancestral figures, an evocative soundscape and moving images that "transductively collapse the geometry of the gallery space" (Barnett 2011).  

Filling the four walls of the gallery are ancestral figures or poupou presiding over visitors. Māori cultural archetypes, some which are traditionally male figures, are reimagined by Reihana as female, such as Mahuika the fire ancestor or become images of mythical heroes such as Maui. Given form via digital image, these figures alternate with video animations of tukututu, a virtual latticework that provides a semblance of the actual tukututu found in physical meetinghouses.

Digital Marae locates the viewer within a space that stimulates a relationship with the sacred and articulates a deeply felt position within this cosmos. This positioning alters the perception of visitors so that they are no longer passive viewers outside of an objective artwork, but placed within it, in direct relation with the "life dynamic" of the work. (Barnett 2011).

Barnett rightly suggests that the affecting nature of Digital Marae is one that will vary depending on a visitor's prior lived relations, accumulated retention and types of semblances, which constitute the limits of what we can see.

For Māori steeped in the culture of the marae, I believe that this insertion of the viewer into the activated space and the updated semblances of Digital Marae provides an expanded or new relational posture in the present, providing "affective anchor points for Māori identity" (O'Reilly 2006) that will act as semblances for new relational postures in the future.

Non-Māori, immersed in Reihana's Digital Marae, may find that they cross the boundary of the so-called disengaged rational gaze and enter a new lived dynamic, or experience the activation of their own past semblances of immanent sacred space.

Boundaries between the past and the present, between the disengaged rationality of the gaze and a lived dynamic, are further subjected to interrogation in Reihana's installation for Pasifika Styles, an exhibit held at Cambridge's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology in 2006.

he tautoko 2006

 " We want you to know that we know [you are looking at us]." Māori artist George Nuku

Reihana breaks down barriers inherent in gallery viewing by transgressing the museum case with he tautoko, her installation for the 2006 Pasifika Styles exhibit at the Museum of Archeaology and Anthropology (MAA), Cambridge University. Pasifika Styles curators Rosanna Raymond and Amiria Salmond invited Pacific artists to engage, reconnect with, and give voice to their taonga (ancestral treasures) in the museum. Reihana uses a carved tekoteko (gable figure) from the MAA collection to create he tautoko ("supporting someone") (Reihana 2008).

Mounted inside a case, the tekoteko looms over viewers while video footage of Cambridge, New Zealand and Reihana's journey between (a reference to the tekoteko's own journey to the museum some 200 years before), is interspersed with digitally altered images of the museum's collection and animated tukutuku patterns. Playing behind the tekoteko, the video footage is his illustrated biography, letting viewers know that he has his own personal history. The tekoteko wears headphones linked to a bank of telephone handsets where visitors listen to stories, songs and the sound of a carver - a soundtrack to the tekoteko's narrative.

Reihana reminds viewers that the tekoteko is not dead or mute and she draws visitors into communication with him. The tekotekois now freed from his long suspended liminal state and has something to tell us. Enlivening the tekoteko, she invites connection to him and other taonga as living beings, creating an enriched relational posture that repositions visitors inside the affective presence of this taonga rather than detachedly gazing at it, from outside.

By adding telephone handsets, sounds and biographic video footage, Reihana has opened a pathway for us to enter the museum case virtually and reach into the past. She has presented us with a new relational posture and lived dynamic with the tekoteko in the present.

The Pacific practice of walking backward into the future is one that can only mean keeping one's eyes focused on the past, and like Digital Marae and he tautoko, Reihana's recent work, in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) is another reworking of relational postures to Pacific history.

in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) 2015

 Charged with recording the transit of Venus across the sun to set longitude in the service of map making and Britain's imperial aims, the illustrated records of James Cook's voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 caught the imagination of Europeans. These illustrations were particularly popular in France, where images created by voyage artists became the basis for wallpaper as both a materialization of French yearning for a return to the patriarchal social order in the chaotic decades following the revolution and beheading of Louis XVI in 1793, and as an illustration of the era's Enlightenment ideal of the "noble savage" and Rousseau's theory of "humanity's salvation in a utopian return to the ignorance, innocence and happiness of its so-called primitive state" (Mamiya 2007).

Depictions of Pacific Islanders in Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique  were created from images four to five times removed from the original voyage illustrations and are presented in universalizing classical garb as Greek or Roman figures engaged in a variety of activities.

Hung in the salons, dining rooms and other public spaces of European and American homes, growing ranks of middle and upper classes sought to employ the wallpaper as a "social signifier and visual rhetoric that helped convey class and identity" (Mamiya 2007) and, I would suggest, likely as an imitative extension of the gentlemanly art of collecting and the Wunderkammern expression of breeding and worldly taste.

Designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet, printed and sold by Joseph Dufour in 1804 - and still sold today - Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean) is scenic wallpaper sold in 20 separate panels, each measuring eight feet by two feet, that can be combined to form panoramic views of the pacific islands and their inhabitants; placing the viewer at eye-level with the action.

As a panorama, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique reinforces the relational posture of the colonial gaze, with the viewer as a central figure within the colonial project. Reihana replicates Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique using green screen and multi-channel video technology to create an immersive panoramic installation that reimagines Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique and provides a corrective to the wallpaper's faulty depictions of the Pacific islands, their inhabitants and its relational posture of central perspectival privilege.

For in Pursuit Of Venus (infected), Reihana scripted multiple narratives based on Cook's Endeavor voyage journals, hired Pacific/Māori actors and dancers, who consulted and collaborated on the creation of their physical performance. In one rewritten vignette, Tahitian dancers portrayed as the classical Three Graces in Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique are re-performed in in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) by Tahitian women who, like all Pacific Island performers in in Pursuit Of Venus (infected), decided on the form and content of their movement and costume. Rather than perform for the viewers, the dancers position their backs to the audience, performing for themselves  and not for the privilege of others.

The video animation for in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) uses multi-dimensional illustration and live-action, which changes the two-dimensional image of Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique into "embodied performances that re-enact the European past from the perspective of the indigenous present" (Ryan 2016). Reihana says that in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) "places viewers as tangata whenua (people of the land).....reversing the perspective to one of insider/tangata whenua rather than outsider/audience member" (Reihana 2015).  

Large-scale production values and high pixel content are physically compelling and "conjure a bodily sense of being in the drama" (Devenport 2015) which, as it slowly scrolls past the stationary viewer, evokes the journeys of star navigators as described by Anne Salmond at the start of this paper; navigators whose canoes stand still as the islands sail past. As with Digital Marae and he tautoko, in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) repositions the viewer's relational posture to one that resides inside of the lived dynamic of the work.

Ursula Frohne, a professor of philosophy and art history at the University of Cologne, notes that panorama is the progenitor to our current cinema culture, which retains 19th century narrative melodrama and uses technologies that allow viewers to experience an affective emotional experience. The narrative melodrama in cinema, she says, allows "viewers to achieve transitions and transformations by means of emotional effect and the perfect illusion" (Frohne, quoted in Devenport 2015).

In other words, the drama creates a relational posture for the viewer. Silent narrative performances in in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) and the installation's immersive qualities "blur the boundary between spectator and spectacle, allowing viewers to imagine themselves as being part of what affects their perception" (Frohne, quoted in Devenport 2015).

Looking to the past, in Pursuit Of Venus (infected) corrects the colonial narrative and by placing of the viewer within it, creates a transformation of our relationship to the past in the present. In this way, Reihana gives viewers alternative semblances with which they can experience a changed relational posture to colonial narratives moving forward into the future.

Lisa Reihana's use of space - real and imagined, actual and virtual - and contemporary technologies within her installations work on the body and its postures. In creating a new relationship with sacred semblances in her 2001 Digital Marae, she transformed potential future encounters with the sacred. By transgressing the rational gaze and traditional object/viewer boundaries in the museum with he tautoko in Pasifika Styles in 2006, she shows us the potential we have for future relationship and communication with our ancestors and their biographies. Reihana's re-creation of the Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique from a Pacific Islander's point of view and our immersion in the action complicates our position in the colonial project by upending our relational posture to it in in Pursuit Of Venus (infected).

In each of these cases, Reihana's work pushes past our locally constituted limitations of past relationships by giving us new experiences of them. Walking backward into the future, Reihana makes new semblances of, and relational postures to history that will now include her rewritten scenes for an alternative lived dynamic of the past, creating for us an altered lived dynamic and transformed future relationships with history.

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