Any biennial, triennial, or other temporary exhibition that sprawls across an entire region has to make the case for itself with each subsequent iteration. Its organizers have to answer the questions: What is urgent about this place? What is distinct? What is shared? How can art highlight these differences? The Fourth Hawai‘i Triennial, formerly the Honolulu Biennial, did just that by identifying trans-island or many-island (poly-nesian) affinities that created pathways for understanding Hawai’i, while also transcending typically patronizing forms of regionality. The triennial, titled “Aloha Nō,” posited an island-centric view of the world, casting a net outward from Hawai’i to include a diverse cast of archipelagic and Indigenous cultures from Samoa, Tonga, Aotearoa New Zealand, Jeju Island, Okinawa, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and beyond.
Concentrated almost entirely around the island of Oahu and the urban core of Honolulu, the exhibition spread across fourteen venues and included the work of forty-nine artists, the majority of whom hail from the Pacific Rim and are mostly from Indigenous communities. Hawai’i is as complicated and rich a site as can be imagined—the state flag displays a Union Jack, American military jets and cargo carriers scream over pristine beaches, and tourists sampling pineapples at the Dole plantation seemingly ignore that the product represents the worst of nineteenth-century imperialist-corpo-colonial expansionism. It’s a complicated dynamic to say the least, and one that curators Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Binna Choi, and Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu approached with a blessedly light touch that mostly eschewed didacticism and looked toward the conciliatory and recuperative. The entire triennial seemed to argue for a nuanced approach to the other—decolonialism as a goal achieved by way of small cumulative gestures, moments of genuine care between individuals, cultural stewardship, and reverence for the natural world, in lieu of grand declarations and performative activism.
Press previews began at what the triennial organizers dubbed “HT25 HUB.” A raw, unfinished office space on the fourteenth and second floors of the Davies Pacific Center, a seemingly generic urban high-rise office complex, served as the largest of the triennial’s exhibition spaces. A sculptural installation made by Korean art collective Rice Brewing Sisters Club, made in collaboration with Kānaka ‘Ōiwi educator Ikaika Bishop, introduced visitors to the space and provided a foil for my understanding of the triennial’s proposal for approaching both otherness and invasiveness. The artists had transformed agar-agar and gorilla ogo, a non-native species of seaweed, into a semiabstract sculptural landscape of hills and rolling clouds. Speaking of the island’s complex relationship with the seaweed, which plagues many of Hawai’i’s waters and outcompetes many native varieties, Bishop suggested a kind of agency and animism, stating that the gorilla ogo was “here for a reason” and needed to be incorporated into an understanding of a total ecology of the island. His attitude, one forgiving of invasive tendencies of the natural world, seemed to echo the thesis of last year’s contested Venice Biennale, positing that all are foreigners, and that the myth of any idealized, ancient, unchanging, pristine Eden is just that.
Further into the space, an installation of photographs by Japanese artist Lieko Shiga was undoubtedly the standout presentation. Taken during a period when Shiga was living in Kitakami—a rural area badly damaged during the 2011 tsunami—where she served as the village photographer, the large-scale prints of varying format were attached to wooden easels and placed in such a way as to encircle the viewer. Mostly depicting inhabitants (often elderly) in relation to natural elements, Shiga employs an eerie, darkly atmospheric style that finds the subjects luridly lit while barely emerging from or enveloped in stark black backgrounds. The overall effect bordered on the sinister, recasting her materteral and avuncular villagers as Lynchian protagonists. Adjacent to Shiga’s Caravaggio-like photographs was a projected video by Puerto Rican artist collective Las Nietas de Nonó. The poetic film stars the Borinquen landscape, juxtaposing rusting industrial implements and machines with jungle environs. A key moment breaks from the dreamy landscapes of the film to present what appears like grainy footage of women shouting, “We’re here!” as a pickup truck reverses toward them.
Leaving the hub to a stopover at Aupuni Space, one of the only alternative contemporary art venues on the island, visitors were shown another way to deal with the invasive: You fall in love with it. Futoshi Miyagi’s small installation of two videos, a photograph, a poster, and sculpture relating to his “American Boyfriend” series documents the vexed, long-term courtship between the subject of the film and a soldier stationed on Okinawa. The videos pair voice-over ruminations on the nature of the queer relationships and identity with dreamy, languid images of the Okinawan landscape. An ashtray at the center of the room displayed two cigarettes in conversation, one for each lover and alternatively branded “Hope” and “Peace,” conjuring not only the rarefied air that exists between those in love but a symbolic equalization of the specific imbalances that exist between the two here.
Later that evening, artists, organizers, and a few select guests were invited on a sunset cruise to celebrate the opening of the triennial. Kahanu opened the festivities by crooning an a cappella dedication in Hawaiian. It was an endearing moment complemented by the solar and lunar fireworks on display, as a strikingly orange sun fell into the water on the starboard side, while across our port side a full moon rose over Diamond Head and the Honolulu skyline. A few hours later at the afterparty, a round of shots provided by the group of Indigenous Kiwi artists was accompanied by a toast to “Fuck Captain Cook!” Maybe we all weren’t so conciliatory after all. Good.
The next day at Hō‘ikeākea Gallery at Leeward Community College, the highlight was a series of sculptures by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope. Titled “Kinyingarra Guwinyanba,”2022–25, the project consisted of a series of wooden stakes festooned with a necklace-like ring of oyster shells and was accompanied by a video of them placed in circular formations within intertidal landscapes across Australia. The shells serve as seeds for young oysters, whose populations have been decimated by environmental degradation, and which travel waterways looking for empty shells to attach to and grow. While a selection was displayed as sculpture within the gallery space, another set was placed in a grassy promontory overlooking Pearl Harbor, or Wai Momi, a bay that once, as its name suggests, served as home to populations of native oysters but that now is only starting to see them return after military installations degraded water conditions.
The presentation in the galleries of the Bishop Museum, the State of Hawai‘i Museum of Natural and Cultural History, was perhaps the most conventional of all the venues. Here, a work of institutional critique by Stephanie Syjuco was masterful in its ability to enhance humble gesture with maximum poetic impact. For the project, Syjuco sourced vitrines and mounts from the museum’s collection, ones typically used to display Hawaiian cultural artifacts in the museum’s adjacent grand atrium of tiered mahogany galleries. Syjuco presents the mounts free from the objects they were designed to support, their spindly black arms and ungainly proportions uncannily mimicking modernist sculptures by the likes of David Smith or Max Ernst. Also placed within the lit vitrines were a series of sepia-tone photographs of island landscapes, the framing of which seemed to suggest that another kind of excision had taken place. The images are in fact anthropologic or ethnographic images of the artist’s native Philippines, from which she removed the figures via Photoshop. Together, the two elements presented a vision of the decolonization of museum space, of remnants, returns, and restitutions told by way of absence.
The day concluded with celebrations for the opening of the triennial at the Honolulu Museum of Art. A monumental pair of twin totems studded with clay heads, abstract metal motifs, and clay vessels by Tewa artist Rose B. Simpson greeted visitors at the street-side entrance to the museum. Simpson’s presence here alluded to the necessity of representing a different kind of island, those created by the reservation system in the United States. A large-scale, floor-bound work by Teresita Fernández again reinforced trans- or inter-island affinities. Volcano (Cervix) fuses a map of Central America and the islands of the Caribbean into a circular form composed of charcoal and black sand collected in Hawai’i. The form very loosely approximates the shape of the titular organ and, according to the exhibition texts, alludes to the history of eugenics and involuntary sterilization in the Caribbean. I admit that I found the cartographic metaphor of solidarity between Latin American regions in the face of increasing American isolationism more arresting at this particular moment.
The final day brought me to the Capitol Modern, the Hawai’i state museum of art, located across the street from the Hawai’i state capitol building and Iolani Palace—the final residence of the Hawaiian monarchy before it was overthrown in 1893. Inside, two standout works served to further complicate conceptions of how to relate to invasiveness. The film By Mary Jo Freshley 프레실리에 의(依)해, by Korean-born, Hawai’i-based artist Sung Hwan Kim, relates the true story of the titular character, a white, American professor and instructor of Korean Halla Huhm dancing who lives on the island. Trained in the dance by diasporic Koreans, Freshley became an expert, and housed, preserved, and catalogued a collection of eight thousand dance-related objects that form the Halla Huhm Dance Collection, stored at the University of Hawai‘i. Part of a larger project that documents the Korean diasporic experience, the film captures Freshley instructing the artist how to perform the dances and performing them herself, along with archival images sourced from the Bishop Museum of Korean immigrants, while a voice-over by the artist relates Freshley’s story, explores the archive, and reads the finding aids that accompany the images. Despite the obvious accusations of cultural appropriation that could be leveled, Kim’s complex, layered portrait of both Freshley and the Korean diaspora of Hawai’i approaches its subject with the reverence of an individual stewarding, rather than exploiting, an almost-lost fragment of intercultural exchange.
Hanging in the foyer of the museum were a series of large textile works by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna. Placed at such a height that it was impossible to navigate the space without confronting them directly, the blanketlike scrims were hoisted by a web of ropes anchored by cinder blocks and car tires and dotted with flags and plastic water bottles. On either side of the textiles were a mix of layered black-and-white images, geometric motifs, Arabic writing, and maplike compositions of shapes, all of which referred to festivals and other cultural happenings that have gone extinct as a result of the occupation in Palestine. It again brought to mind the inter-island correspondences championed by the triennial. For what is Palestine if not an island surrounded by a turbulent geopolitical ocean that seeks to consume it, level it, and return it to bare earth?
I left Honolulu with the sense that the triennial had indeed made a case for itself, at least according to the criteria that I established at the outset. However, I also left with the feeling that I was not part of the intended or imagined audience for its argument, and my summation of how this event compared with any other similar happening was of little consequence. I was an outsider who was allowed to observe a moment created for islanders worldwide to see themselves reflected and to be recognized for their endurance and resilience. Everybody already knew each other here—I was invited, and would be welcomed in, but my opinion, and by extension that of the art world writ large, could only minimally bolster what had already flourished.
The Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025 “Aloha Nō” is on view through May 4th.
