HT25 Aloha Nō Artist Spotlight

Art in Conversation | Kapwani Kiwanga and Meleanna Aluli Meyer
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Atherton Hālau | Castle Memorial Building

FREE with registration

Join us for an in-depth conversation with two artists who have created monumental works for the Hawaiʻi Triennial — the Vestibule at Bishop Museum by Kawani Kiwanga and ʻUmeke Lāʻau by Meleanna Aluli Meyer at Honolulu Hale – moderated by HT25 curator and American Studies Faculty Noelle Kahanu. Kiwanga and Aluli Meyer will share how these artistic spatial interventions contribute to conversations around historical inequities, social injustices, and healing and reconciliation.

Mahalo ā nui to the Univerity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa American Studies Department for generously supporting this program.

Meleanna Aluli Meyer is a visual poet — alchemist of light and moving image, and translator of ʻike Hawaiʻi — native wisdom through kaona, metaphor. Engaging audiences and viewers on canvas, in film, and the written word, Aluli Meyer interfaces with the world through a Hawaiian lens, which allows her to share authentically, from a Kanaka, Hawaiian, perspective. As a kamaʻāina, child of the land, Aluli Meyer has cultivated a deep appreciation and connection to the sands of Kailua, her one hānau, birthplace, in the ahupua‘a of Koʻolaupoko, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.

Aluli Meyer is a seeker, with a never-ending curiosity about complex, intractable issues that provide a rich palette from which to draw, paint, ideate, and realize her work. As an award-winning artist and educator she sees her work as a springboard for deeper conversations, and further, for reconciliation and healing. Aluli Meyer builds her work, layer by layer, often digitally, pressing ideas that translate into resonant and vibrant images and films that allow others access into a Hawaiian worldview that is authentic and deep.

Kapwani Kiwanga is French and Canadian, she lives and works between Paris and Berlin. Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at l’École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance.

Kiwanga co-opts the canon; she turns systems of power back on themselves, in art and in parsing broader histories. In this manner Kiwanga has developed an aesthetic vocabulary that she described as “exit strategies,” works that invite one to see things from multiple perspectives so as to look differently at existing structures and find ways to navigate the future differently.

HT25 ALOHA NŌ at Bishop Museum

Now in its fourth iteration, HT25 is the collaborative effort of dozens of artists, key venues and organizational partners engaging on the central theme of ALOHA NŌ. A resounding call to know, ALOHA NŌ is an invitation to form new understandings of love as acts of care, resistance, solidarity, and transformation. Contrary to its ubiquitous and over-commodified presence, aloha is an action that comprises a profound love and truth-telling, a practice that has been kept and cared for by the people of Hawaiʻi for generations. This practice of aloha engenders deep connectivity to the ʻāina, oceanic environment, elements, and each other. It allows us to manifest sovereignty and self-determination, and to stand in solidarity with others.

HT25 ALOHA NŌ at Bishop Museum exhibits the work of nine contemporary artists, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Nālamakūikapō Ahsing, Emily Karaka, John Pule, Kapwani Kiwanga, Salote Tawale, Sione Faletau, Stephanie Syjuco and Tiare Ribeaux. Their respective art practices have a connection to cultural material and are informed by archival collections, including the collections of Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. This intergenerational grouping of artists explores their personal and cultural relationships to land and colonized territories, offering visualizations of “home/land” and interpretations of its defense.