'That multifaceted experience of culture': Greg Semu's Noble Savage (2007)

For the 2006 All Blacks tour of France and the 2007 Rugby World Cup in Saint-Denis, Adidas© produced the ‘Bonded by Blood’ poster, depicting the team performing their signature haka, ‘Ka Mate Ka Mate.’ Adidas© then gifted the poster to the ethnological Musée Quai Branly (Paris) for the exhibition ‘The Scrum of Cultures,’ which ran to coincide with the tournament. As part of the exhibition, Greg Semu was invited to respond to the Adidas© poster as the inaugural artist in residence. Semu replied with a series of 11 photographs of Māori men re-enacting a European fantasy of ‘noble savages.’ In this paper, I argue that through a chaotic stratification of European fantasies of self and other, Greg Semu demonstrates that the ‘myth of the noble savage’ is a construct of the Imperial Gaze. Semu’s art unveils the corporate appropriation of indigenous peoples that continues the epistemic violence of cultural displacement occurring through colonization.

Speaker:

Jenny Davis Barnett is a casual academic in the French Discipline of the School of Languages and Cultures and a PhD candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at UQ. Jenny’s research interests include Visual Culture, French Studies, and Intellectual History.