ʻUla Nōweo Reflection Series

Featuring D. Kauwila Mahi
Ka punohu ku i ka moana: The upright red-misted rainbow atop the ocean.

Saturday, August 10, 2024
11:30 am
Castle Memorial Building
FREE with Museum Admission

ʻUla Nōweo refers to the glowing red witnessed at the rising, or setting, of the sun; times of the day especially suited for reflection. Inspired by the Bishop Museum original exhibition Ka ʻUla Wena: Oceanic Red, the ʻUla Nōweo Reflection Series, offers artists, scholars and community leaders of Hawaiʻi an opportunity to meditate upon manifestations of the color red in their own traditional practices and contemporary lives. Join us for this series of expositions, readings and expressions of practice, intended to inspire further contemplation and conversation.

The ʻUla Nōweo Reflection Series will continue weekly through Saturday, January 11, 2025.

In this ʻUla Nōweo Reflection D. Kauwila Mahi will be recalling oceanic reds that are tied to akua Hawaiʻi. Innumerable moʻolelo and mele record ʻula in its many forms: in the red-hued rainbows upright atop the ocean, in the red-mist of mountain-bound rains, in the sacred stories which adorn names, within crimson-red and golden-hued feathers of a cloak or kiʻi. These forms of ʻula and many others root an understanding of our distinct traditions across Moananuiākea to important signs, signifiers, and symbols of change. Many of these akua have names that are dormant or out of popular recollection. This reflection will recall some of these akua, trace their kinolau through a genealogy of ʻula, and incite participants to call forth and witness these akua in our constellation of movements for ea.

Daniel Kauwila Mahi is an ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi visual artist, researcher, video game designer, and composer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi who has exhibited art internationally in places such as Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, Canada, and the United States. Kauwila’s work embodies genealogical rhythms of sovereignty, solidarity, ceremony, and contested governance through ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. They have served as a sound designer and sound design mentor in award winning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi Video Games, He Ao Hou and Wao Kanaka, and have won the Jim Winters Award for 3-Dimensional Design for their piece Kuikawalakii in Honolulu Museum of Art’s Bi-Annual show Artists of Hawaiʻi 2021.

Kauwila has also been a Hawaiian language translator for multiple universities and Indigenous community histories across Turtle Island while mentoring both graduate and undergraduate students in translation theory and praxis. Kauwilaʻs work resides in the margins of Aloha ʻĀina traversing an Indigenous future, while refusing state-sponsored, violent reproductions of militourism and missionary descendants. Through their work they interpolate and remix ancestral chants, stories, acoustemologies, and instrumentation underscoring the rhythm of the underbelly of Hawaiʻi. Kauwila credits his matriarchal genealogy of lei makers, feather workers, and Hawaiian Sovereignty photographers for the accolades they have received.