"In Pursuit of Venus" at LACMA

Small detail of Lisa Reihana's in Pursuit of Venus [infected],  2015–17. LACMA and Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

LACMA is showing Lisa Reihana's in Pursuit of Venus [infected], an extraordinary 70-ft-wide video that was purchased jointly with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2019. It's on view in "Grounded," a group show on BCAM's second floor through June 21, 2026.

Though we live in a TikTok age, video art can be a hard sell to museum audiences. Reihana's in Pursuit of Venus [infected] is, along with Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) and Ragnar Kjartansson's The Visitors (2012), a popular work that truly expands conceptions of video art and even cinema itself. A version of in Pursuit of Venus was shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and it has built a cult following in showings around the world.

Jean-Gabriel Charvet (designer) and Joseph Dufour et Cie (printer), Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, about 1804-1806. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Reihana's inspiration was wallpaper. She came across a French Neoclassical wallpaper, Les Savages de la Mer Pacifique, in the National Gallery of Australia. Capitalizing on European interest in the South Seas, the panoramic wallpaper assembles unrelated vignettes of Pacific Islanders and European visitors. The vignettes cover a lot of ground, from New Zealand to Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest, even though they're set in one continuous landscape. They also span moments in the life and death of Britain's Captain James Cook. A pivotal event is Cook's voyage to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun on June 3, 1769. 

Reihana, a Maori artist, reimagined the wallpaper from a Pacific perspective. Printed figures are replaced with about 70 moving vignettes of actors shot against green screen. They scroll slowly past the eye, enacting recorded history and what's been left out. The title's "Venus" and "infected" allude to venereal disease, the first consequence of colonialism. 

Small detail showing a figure based on Philip James de Loutherberg's costume design for the pantomime Omai, or A Trip Round the World, 1785

Making a cameo appearance is Mai (or Omai), the Tahitian subject of the Joshua Reynolds portrait now jointly owned by the Getty and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Reihana drew on many sources for her vignettes. In the detail above, the masked figure's costume is not Polynesian at all. It's based on a costume design for a British stage comedy based (very loosely) on Mai's life. Like history itself, Reihana's video is a comedy, a sardonic farce of cultural misunderstandings. 

The video runs 64 minutes, ultimately ending up where it began and continuing seamlessly. The artist connects that to Ta-Va, the Polynesian conception of eternal time. A Maori proverb has it: "I walk backward into the future with my eyes fixed on my past."

LACMA installation view