Hawai‘i Triennial 2022 (HT22)
Various venues, Honolulu 18 February – 8 May
Though a citywide project, the intended scope of the Hawai‘i Triennial is far greater: bounded in space by the Pacific Rim and in time by a future that its curators – Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick – speculate will unfold in contradistinction to the previous century, controlled as it was by an American regime that, per the catalogue, imposed a ‘transAtlantic… economic and cultural supremacy’ on a global scale. This third outing (the previous two as biennials) of the island event is titled
E Ho‘omau no Moananuiākea, which reduces to
Pacific Century in translation. No surprise then that the shift that the curators predict is towards the other side of the planet, and the rise of ‘the Asia-pacific’ to a level of sociocultural preeminence across the hemispheres, with Hawai‘i at the centre of the action.
Broderick points out in his catalogue essay that the geographic position of the Hawaiian archipelago forms the navel of the Pacific, an apt description for a hub where ‘competing worldviews have energetically intersected for centuries’, and where pehea ko piko? – how’s your navel? – is a common greeting. Posed at Richard Bell’s
Embassy (2013–), a mobile forum for Aboriginal people held during the triennial’s first days, the query prompted discussions on the annexation of Hawai‘i by the United States; inspired tributes to deceased community members; and challenged notions of the other. One participant, the filmmaker and educator Meleanna Auli‘i Meyer, argued that the virtues of aloha – profound, universal love – could save humanity from self-made crises both sociological and ecological.
The cultural and historical significance of the assembly was further highlighted by its proximity to Iolani Palace, where Hawai‘i’s last monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, was placed under house arrest in 1895 by a court order relating to the American seizure of the Hawaiian Kingdom. During the months she spent incarcerated, she received bouquets of flowers (their newspaper wrappings providing her with intel on current events) whose blossoms came to symbolise resistance, the preservation of the queen’s dignity and, by extension, that of the Hawaiian people. An inventory of those blossoms kept by the queen, wherein she dedicated specimens to loyal supporters, served as the basis for Jennifer Steinkamp’s Queen Lili‘uokalani (2022), an animation projected onto the facade of the palace. Unseen until dusk, Steinkamp’s projection drapes the building in luminous garlands that appear as delicate as lei; each of the building’s columns is illuminated by flowers, yet the architecture – seen in a new light – recalls the bars of a prison. This monumental work evokes the imprisonment story, as well as the cultural trauma of occupation, and reflects the poetic manner in which the queen linked devotee to flower in her botanical inventory of resilience.
While the inclusion of artists such as Ai Weiwei and Theaster Gates adds blockbuster cachet to a programme composed of 43 artists, many others are indigenous to Polynesia and, like the curators (especially Broderick, who hails from O‘ahu), intent on representing regional art-histories. At the Hawai‘i State Art Museum (HISAM), the duo Piliāmo‘o (Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf) presents a selection of photographs from Ē Luku Wale Ē: Devastation Upon Devastation (1989–), their ongoing documentation of and reactions to the H-3 highway in Kāne‘ohe, O‘ahu. A verse taken from a kanikau (dirge) written by Landgraf is displayed on the gallery walls and introduces a series of photographs that depict physical trauma to the land: images that show stunning vistas gouged by the road, or evidence of the ecological waste and cultural loss wrought by transport infrastructure that annihilates the land it seeks to ‘develop’. In adjacent galleries, vitrines are dedicated to publications by ‘Elepaio Press,
active since 1976 (and cofounded by Hamasaki), which provided a platform for Indigenous voices during its first decade in operation, when alternative publishing outlets for creative expression were largely absent from Hawai‘i. Surrounding the vitrines, examples of concrete poetry associated with ‘Elepaio’s formative years emblazon walls. These words-as-images bring to life a moment when Hawaiian artists utilised the small press format to distribute their work across Oceania, contributing to the development of the region’s arts and letters in the last decades of the twentieth century.
At HISAM visitors can also watch the documentary videos of Joan Lander and Puhipau, a filmmaking pair operating as Nā Maka O Ka ‘Āina (‘The Eyes of the Land’) until the latter’s death in 2016, who recorded myriad aspects of Hawaiian culture associated with social- and environmental-justice actions during the 70s. These videos establish a dialogue with Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin’s painting, film and costume design installation Aue Away: The Language of Flowers (2022), at Honolulu Museum of Art, which aligns modern Indigenous resistance with the American civil-rights movement and other twentieth-century humanitarian protest movements, while deconstructing appropriative tiki aesthetics through a queer Polynesian lens.
Over at the Royal Hawaiian Center shopping mall in Waikiki, an empty shop transformed into an exhibition space recalls a cultural trend for exhibitions mounted in complexes across Asia, described by Melissa Chiu during a private tour, which despite its commercial (and therefore cynical) implications, also renders access to art more democratic. This conclusion seems crucial when accessibility provides connections to artists dispelling hegemonic normativity. Case in point is Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia I–V (2016–21), a video depicting erotic encounters between young men and jungle ferns, projected on repeat. Enthusiastically and ambitiously perverse, Pteridophilia puts aloha to radical practice by inspiring interspecies love, giving new definition to the term ‘eco-friendly’ – all in stark contrast to, say, the destruction of nature in order to build a highway.
Moving-image works dominate the Bishop Museum, notably Ahilapalapa Rands’s Lift Off (2018), a three-channel video installation addressing the issue of scientific intrusion atop Mauna Kea, the holy mountain located on Hawai‘i Island. Two channels show Mauna Kea in an unbroken panorama, its summit dotted with astronomical observatories. Subversive hilarity ensues when a crudely drawn figure, introduced in the third channel, plays an ipu heke (a double gourd percussion instrument), causing the telescopes in the affiliate channels to bounce, spin and explode in synchrony with the rhythmic drumming. Behind each beat on Rands’s soundtrack one can detect a vehement “No!” – an expression of solidarity with those protesting the construction of yet another observatory on Mauna Kea, the
Thirty Meter Telescope, who argue that the structure would further desecrate the site.
The Hawai‘i Triennial highlights local issues for a global audience but tries to avoid navelgazing by examining the archipelago’s history within a transregional context and from a decolonising perspective. Moreover, it wants to initiate, from Honolulu, manifold alternative and more equitable social topographies through art. Yet for all of its awareness in these regards, and its curatorial insistence that persistent, constructive and critical dialogue laps away at rigid, age-compacted injustices like waves redefining a coastline, it has relied perhaps too greatly on the excitement the conceits inspire. The result is an exhibition populated by artists extraordinarily well versed in injustices stemming from long-term social inequality but encyclopaedic on the matter to a point that risks both historicisation and atomisation. It asks its audience to speculate about such possibilities without end and from a place located in a present contending with an unjust past. This could be its undoing: the programme is too varied and locked into the moment for one to gain purchase on any given solution. Or this could be its most generous resolve: myriad possibilities that confront today for the benefit of tomorrow means there are myriad possibilities on the horizon – a solution in and of itself. The predicament alone, born of the question of possibility, lends credence to the latter opinion, and only in the latter does a hypothetical century become a conceivable future; that is, a promise fulfilled. Patrick J. Reed