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Don’t Miss: “Darwin in Paradise Camp” at the Whitworth in Manchester

In Manchester, artist Yuki Kihara inhabits Charles Darwin and Paul Gauguin to reclaim and articulate her Fa’afafine identity in an exhibition that is at once playful, subversive and deeply moving.

There’s a moment in “Yuki Kihara: Darwin in Paradise Camp” where Paul Gauguin asks Kihara what she plans to do with his paintings. Kihara, a Japanese-Sāmoan artist and a member of the Fa’afafine community, tells the French Post-Impressionist, who died in 1903 and is most famous for his paintings produced in French Polynesia, that she’s updating his work to counterbalance their misleading narrative about the Pacific Islands. She tells Gauguin that she wants him to see “your work through my eyes.”

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This interaction is from a video, Talanoa between Yuki Kihara and Paul Gauguin, in which Kihara has a conversation with herself dressed as Gauguin. (A Talanoa is a word used in the Pacific to denote an inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue.) The scene is typical of Kihara’s practice: a necessary reevaluation of the past through playful theatrics and camp aesthetics. Gauguin never set foot in Samoa but used Sāmoan photography from the 19th Century to inspire his paintings, which diluted the Pacific Islands and its various peoples into a monolithic generalization. Kihara ‘upcycles’ Gauguin’s work and creates what is the........

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