Visitors and reviewers described Yuki Kihara’s 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition, Paradise Camp, as a highlight, with official in-person attendance figures reaching 485,079. Paradise Camp was also ranked in the top five exhibitions at the Biennale by international media, among others, by The Art News Paper and ArtReview.
It was all the more significant because Yuki Kihara was the first Asian, Pasifika and Fa’afafine artist to represent Aotearoa at the Venice Biennale.
Described as “gloriously irreverent and fabulously camp” (Art Agenda), Paradise Camp was curated by Natalie King with Ioana Gordon-Smith seconded from Pātaka Art+Museum as Assistant Curator.
The New Zealand pavilion was centrally located in the Arsenale and centred around a “gloriously lush and vivid” (Artlink) suite of twelve photographs, shot in Sāmoa, that recast and ‘upcycled’ paintings by French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin featuring Fa’afafine and Fa’atama models. Kihara’s photographic series featured a cast and crew of close to one hundred people from rural villages, churches, plantations and heritage sites photographed on location in Sāmoa.
The photographs were described by the Financial Times as “meticulously composed and super luscious”. Nearby, Kihara assembled an archive or “Vārchive” of material displaying Kihara’s research into Polynesian queer histories.
Kihara also convened online and in-person gatherings entitled Talanoa Forum that were presented between Venice, Leiden and Amsterdam. The Talanoa Forum brought together a roster of artists, curators, scholars, activists, community leaders and policymakers from the Pacific and internationally to discuss and expand on the main themes of the exhibition.
Paradise Camp was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue – also supported by the Pātaka Foundation – edited by Natalie King and published by Thames and Hudson with wide distribution channels across the northern hemisphere. The writers of Paradise Camp featured chapters by Emeritus Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Reverend Ruperake Petaia, Coco Fusco, Patrick Flores, Chantal Spitz, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Daniel Satele, Ioana Gordon Smith, Natalie King and Yuki Kihara.
Following the Venice Biennale, Paradise Camp was exhibited at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, 24th March till 31st December 2023.
SOURCE: NZ AT VENICE