Venice and "The Other"

The hat featured in Self-Portrait with a Hat (1893–94) by Paul Gauguin is similar to the hat worn by American showman Buffalo Bill.

Gauguin was inspired to journey to the global south after visiting Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West’ show and the ‘Palace of the Colonies’ at the Exposition Universelle, which ran concurrently in Paris in 1889.

Subsequently, Buffalo Bill staged a ‘human zoo’: a colonial theatre which displayed Native American Dakota chiefs in Venice in the 1890s. Kihara’s Gauguin with a hat (After Gauguin) responds to ‘the other’ histories of Venice from an Indigenous perspective.