Artwork description / Biography
Illusions
The Myth of the “Vahine” through Gender Dysphoria
Namsa Leuba’s most recent project, Illusions, was created in Tahiti and inspired by the paintings of Paul Gauguin and “tropical” images in Modern art, which occupy the Western collective unconscious. This type of imagery casts the Polynesian woman as beautiful, desirable, subservient, and connected to the natural environment. This myth of the “vahine”, as Polynesian women are referred to, is historically rooted in the West’s search for the “original” and “authentic”, which was thought to be found in far away cultures, with a connection between the body, soul and land. Gauguin’s paintings in French Polynesia were influential in developing the Primitivist art movement, which articulated a visualization of the “other” through a connectivity to nature.
The subjects in Leuba’s contemporary portraits act out their role of the “vahine”, yet through non-binary definitions of gender conformity. Her sitters are known in Tahiti as “Mahu” (an effeminate man) or “rae rae” (transgender). Leuba stages the fictional narratives with a painterly sensibility. Decorated with cultural and social ornaments, the models distinguish themselves with colorful cosmetics and body paint, creating a surreal sense of beauty and strangeness. They blend into nature, like creatures between myth and reality. They symbolize their identity through the incarnation of the spirit, by the image beyond the confines of the body. Connecting to this female archetype, it is an attempt at metamorphosis, as well as an ideological challenge to the visual codes initiated by Gauguin and his search for the primitive.
Bio:
Namsa Leuba (Switzerland, b. 1982) studied photography at ECAL, University of Art and Design Lausanne, and obtained a Masters in Art Direction at ECAL. Her work has been published in numerous magazines, including I-D, Numéro, KALEIDOSCOPE, Foam, Interview, Vice Magazine, New York Magazine, Libération, British Journal of Photography, and European Photography. In 2010, Leuba won First Prize at the Planches Contact Festival in Deauville, France. In 2012, Leuba was awarded the PhotoGlobal Prize at the Photography Festival in Hyères. She was the winner of the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Festival in 2013, Emerging photographer in Boston. In 2017, her work was nominated Foam Talent. Namsa Leuba has participated in recent exhibitions including Photoquai in Paris, France; Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Nataal: New African Photography at Redhook Labs, Brooklyn; Africa Reframed in Copenhagen, Denmark; Daegu Photo Biennale in Daegu, Korea; the Athens Photo Festival in Athens, Greece, and a performance in Off Print at the Tate Modern, London. Her work is included in prestigious private collections including the Swiss Foundation for Photography and the Tang Museum (New York). Leuba’s first large scale solo exhibition, Ethnomodern, was held at Art Twenty One in Lagos in 2016. Leuba lives and works between Europe and French Polynesia.
