GREG SEMU — The last cannibal supper — Metropolis Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 8 → October 20, 2012

Greg Semu is a Samoan Samoans constitute the second Polynesian population after Maoris of

New Zealand.
The Samoa’s islands are populated for more than 3 000 years by Polynesian people . Samoan language is the most ancient still spoken in Oceania.
In the 70s his family emigrates to New Zealand.
Greg Semu grows in Auckland, when the city became the biggest, the most heterogeneous and the most dangerous city of Pacific
Racism, unemployment, poverty, concentration of populations coming from all the Pacific, brutally immersed in the occidental urban culture, the break with traditional social organization provoked a deep identity crisis.
Greg Semu chose to claim his cultural roots and the pride of his difference.
He took up with the tradition of Samoan by submitting the painful initiatic rituals of Pé’a

Five photographic paintings from the suite “Last Cannibale Super” presented for first time in Europe, are a kind of hybridisation.
The codes of representation of occidental religiouspainting are replayed by Kanak players, dressed in traditional bark fibers costumes for a sacred ceremony.
The scenes are represented with a big delicacy, a virtue at the same time visual and moral , in the simplicity of their formal harmony.

" The unique appearance of a distant " defined by Walter Benjamin in 1935, recreated through the blend of times, styles, techniques and powers , can be Greg Semu’s creative thinking … MGV