DARWIN IN PARADISE CAMP: YUKI KIHARA

The Sainsbury Centre’s Can the Seas Survive Us? season will chart a course through the story of the oceans, and the dangerous future that they may be heading towards, featuring historical artworks, maps, atlases, archives, and contemporary art from across the globe.

In Darwin in Paradise: Yuki Kihara, the Sainsbury Centre will host the UK premiere of Paradise Camp, the celebrated work by Yuki Kihara, an interdisciplinary artist of Sāmoan and Japanese descent. Paradise Camp upcycles the works of French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), exposing his stereotypical and inaccurate representations of Pacific Islanders in his works made whilst living in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, which become his most celebrated. Kihara recasts past narratives by casting Fa’afafine models – a third gender community in Sāmoa which Kihara also belongs to – in colourful, hyperreal photographs.

The project will be further developed following new research that reveals how evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) shaped some of his findings to conform to the conservative values of the Victorian period and hid aspects of his research on non-heteronormative species and same-sex attraction in animals.