Yuki Kihara: Darwin in Paradise Camp - The Whitworth, Manchester

3 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

'A visually stunning exhibition centring Indigenous, queer worlds by Japanese-Sāmoan artist Yuki Kihara.

The Whitworth is proud to present Yuki Kihara’s acclaimed installation Paradise Camp (2022), first presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, and a new video work, Darwin Drag (2025).

Kihara delves into art histories and archives to unpick the effects of colonialism on the peoples and ecologies of the Pacific. Her visually compelling projects centre and empower the Fa’afafine and Fa’atama in Sāmoa, traditional yet marginalised third gender communities to which the artist belongs. In this exhibition, Kihara focuses on two celebrated Western figures – French modernist artist Paul Gauguin and evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – who each shaped Western understandings of the Pacific.

Paradise Camp responds to famous paintings of Tahiti and its people by French modernist artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Through archival research, Kihara links Gauguin’s paintings to colonial photographs taken in Sāmoa. Described by Kihara as an act of 'upcycling', she recreates Gauguin’s compositions in a series of 12 resplendent high definition photographs, shot on location in Upolu Island. Collaborating with Fa’afafine models and production crew, Kihara repurposes these cultural artefacts to speak to, and from, queer Indigenous worlds in a profound gesture of reclamation.'

Continued ... 
https://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/yukikihara/

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic -------------------------------------------  mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group-population

My source:

Josh Lustig. Yuki Kihara, Gallery, FT Magazine, November 22, 2025, #1152. pp.12-13.