The Hawaiʻi Triennial, held every three years, is a statewide exhibition of contemporary art from Hawaiʻi, the Pacific, and beyond. Bishop Museum is honored to once again be a participating venue, this year featuring the work of nine artists whose respective practices have a connection to cultural material and are informed by archival collections, including those of Bishop Museum.
Opening Soon
February 15 - May 4, 2025
Museum Hours
Open Daily
9 am – 5 pm
Closed Thanksgiving
& Christmas Day
Ages
All Ages
Location
Castle Building
Admission
Members: Free
Adults: $33.95
Seniors (65+): $30.95
Youth (4–17): $25.95
Children (3 and under): Free
Children age 16 and younger must be accompanied by an adult.
ALOHA NŌ
ALOHA NŌ is a call to know Hawaiʻi as a place of rebirth, resilience, and resistance; a place that embraces humanity in all of its complexities — with a compassion and care that can only be described as aloha. In the words of Kanaka ʻŌiwi (native Hawaiian) philosopher Dr. Manulani Aluli Meyer, “Hawaiʻi is vital now, and our way of spirit is the spirit of aloha. Ulu aʻe ke welina a ke aloha. Loving is the practice of an awake mind.”
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 a deep connectivity to the ʻāina (land), oceanic environment, elements, and each other. It enables us to protect and defend inter-archipelagic relations, that which we love, and our mutual interdependence. It allows us to manifest sovereignty and self-determination, and to stand in solidarity with others.
By collapsing two, seemingly opposite, notions — “no” in English with “nō,” an intensifier in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) — ALOHA NŌ reclaims aloha from a colonial-capitalist historicity and situates it as a transformative power that is collectively enacted through contemporary art. While specific to Hawaiian and Pacific environments, ALOHA NŌ resonates across other cultures and geographies, especially sovereign lands with similar histories and struggles against colonial occupation and capitalist violence.
Through ALOHA NŌ, we will undo the harmful, misogynistic, stereotypical images of Hawaiʻi, and instead embrace the kaona (layered meaning) of aloha as manifested in a myriad of forms, including aloha ʻāina (love of land), mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogy to people and place), mo‘olelo (storied traditions), and ho‘opono (healing through speaking truth, forgiveness and mutual emergence). More than a theme, ALOHA NŌ also guides the process of curatorial and artistic engagement, creating a method of relationality to ʻāina, sites of exhibition, and audiences.
Now in its fourth iteration, Hawai‘i Triennial 2025 (HT25) is the largest, periodic exhibition of contemporary art in Hawaiʻi, involving dozens of artists, key venues and organizational partners. For the first time, HT25 will also expand beyond the island of Oʻahu, to the islands of Maui and Hawaiʻi. ALOHA NŌ invites all — native islanders, settlers, immigrants, and tourists — to experience and un/learn how to enter and center a place called Hawaiʻi. ALOHA NŌ is a call to know, an invitation to form new understandings of love as acts of care, resistance, solidarity, and transformation.
Hawaiʻi Contemporary
Artists
Brandy Nālani McDougall
From the ahupuaʻa of Aʻapueo in Kula, Maui, Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi, she/her/ʻo ia) is the author of two poetry collections, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai (2008) and ʻĀina Hānau, Birth Land (2023). A Ford and Mellon-Hawaiʻi fellow, her critical monograph Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (University of Arizona Press, 2016) is the first extensive study of contemporary Hawaiian literature and was the winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award in 2017. She is the director of the Mānoa Center for Humanities and Civic Engagement and an Associate Professor of American Studies (specializing in Indigenous studies) at UH Mānoa. She is the Hawaiʻi Poet Laureate for 2023-2025. She lives with her keiki in Kalaepōhaku, Honolulu in the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī on Oʻahu.
Nālamakūikapō Ahsing
Jonathan Day Nālamakūikapō Ahsing was born on Oʻahu in 1998 and raised in Puʻuloa, ‘Ewa by parents Alan and Karin Ahsing. He is a Kanaka Maoli artist, mahiʻai, and apprentice voyager with Hōkūleʻa. Nālamakū’s work honors the lessons of his teachers, love of his family, and mana of his ʻāina. His work centers ancestral ecological knowledge and cultivates Kānaka Maoli life, land, and sovereignty. His process is his island, the material upon which he asks: What knowledge is encoded through pattern? How do we activate Indigenous wisdom to uplift contemporary solutions? How do we exact a language which embraces interdependence as a vision of the spectacular? Who are we as the ancestors of tomorrow?
Nālamakū’s work is deeply committed to perpetuating his language, history, culture, and community. His works expresses aloha ʻāina through ʻohe kāpala, printmaking, papermaking, sculpture, and biocultural restoration. He currently lives in Waimānalo and serves as the ʻĀina Restoration Coordinator for Kauluakalana, stewarding the lands of Ulupō Heiau and Kawainui Fishpond. He is a graduate of Kamehameha Schools and Williams College (Honors BFA, BS).
Recent exhibitions include: ʻAi Pōhaku, Stone Eaters at Leeward and Kapiʻolani Community College, Mai Hoʻohuli ka Lima i Luna at Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, He Noho Pili Kua//He Noho Pili Alo at Aupuni Space, and Unstable Connections at Williams College Museum of Art.
Stephanie Syjuco
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award, and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019-20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Walker Art Museum, and The 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.
Kapwani Kiwanga
Kapwani Kiwanga (b. Hamilton, Canada) 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.
In 2022, Kiwanga received the Zurich Art Prize (CH). She was also the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize (FR) in 2020, Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the annual Sobey Art Award (CA) in 2018. She represents Canada at the 60th International Venice Art Biennale in 2024.
Solo exhibitions include Copenhagen Contemporary (DN); Serralves Foundation, Porto (PT); Bozar, Brussels (BE); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (CA); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (DE); Capc, Bordeaux (FR); MOCA, Toronto (CA); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (CH) ; New Museum, New York (USA); State of Concept, Athens (GR); Moody Center for the Arts, Austin (USA); Haus der Kunst, Munich (DE); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne (CHE); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (USA); Albertinum museum, Dresden (DE); Esker Foundation, Calgary (CA); Power Plant, Toronto (CA); Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago (USA); South London Gallery, London (UK) and Jeu de Paume, Paris (FR)
among others.
She is represented by Galerie Poggi, Paris; Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg, Cape Town and London and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin.
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 ways to navigate the future differently.
Salote Tawale
Salote Tawale lives and works on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia. Working across performance, moving image, painting photography and installation, Tawale explores the identity of the individual within collective systems, society and communities. Works are contingent on her own body and experiences to present nuanced articulations of the complex negotiations of living in the diaspora as a Fijian woman of Anglo heritage living in Australia. Recent works expand these concerns and significance of indigenous methodologies as a form of decolonial practice. Tawale is a Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney.
Tiare Ribeaux
Tiare Ribeaux is a Kānaka ‘Ōiwi lmmaker, artist, and creative producer based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Her films disrupt conventional storytelling methods by employing magical realist explorations of spirituality, labor, and the environment to critique both social and ecological imbalances. Her work uses components of speculative fiction and fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of healing, queerness, lineage, and belonging. Ribeaux’s work traverses between the mundane and dreamworlds – creating stories around transformation and how our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. She integrates immersion within community, personal/ancestral narratives, and Hawaiian cosmology into her lms. Her work often combines with installation elements to create immersive and expanded media experiences.
Outside of lm festivals, she has shown her work at galleries and museums – in single-channel formats, multi-channel, live cinematic performances, and augmented reality.
She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the Creative Capital Award, the NDN Radical Imagination Grant, the Native Lab Fellowship and Indigenous Film Fund from Sundance, two New and Experimental Works Grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Aairs, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. She has given guest lectures at conferences and universities including ISEA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, SFAI, SJSU, and the school of ATEC at UC Dallas.
She served as Artistic Director at B4BEL4B Gallery for 8 years, curated and produced various media arts and performance festivals including the Soundwave Biennial and the Codame Festival, and taught international media arts workshops in Kyiv, Ukraine (2018) as part of the American Arts Incubator and Ōtepoti, Aotearoa (2023) as part of Leonardo’s Cultural Impact Lab.
She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the Creative Capital Award, NDN Radical Imagination Fellowship, Sundance Native Lab Fellowship, Indigenous Film Fund, two New and Experimental Works Grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund, among others.
Dr Sione Faletau
Dr Sione Faletau is an Aotearoa New Zealand born Tongan artist who is based in Otara South Auckland based. He is a visionary artist who skillfully navigates the intersection of tradition and contemporary expression. Faletau draws inspiration from the vibrant heritage of Tongan artistry, infusing it with a modern twist.
With a profound respect for the traditional art forms of Tonga, Faletau seamlessly integrates Kupesi (patterns) practices into a contemporary context. Through mediums that range from digital art, projection mapping, and digital sound scape crafts pieces that serve as a bridge between the past and the present.
Faletau’s work reflects a deep understanding of Tongan cultural symbolism and storytelling. Each piece not only pays homage to the rich tapestry of Tonga’s artistic legacy but also invites viewers to reconsider the dynamic evolution of culture in the face of modernity.
Having exhibited in Bundanon Art Museum Sydney Australia and galleries around Aotearoa New Zealand, Faletau stands as a cultural ambassador, bringing Tongan traditions to global audiences. Through his art, Faletau sparks a dialogue about identity, heritage, and the ever-evolving nature of artistic expression.
With a commitment to preserving and reimagining Tonga’s artistic heritage, Faletau invites viewers to embark on a journey where tradition and contemporary innovation coalesce, creating a visual narrative that transcends time and resonates across cultures.
Emily Karaka
Emily Karaka was born in 1952 in Tāmaki Makaurau, where she continues to live and work. She is of Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Hine and Ngāti Kahu o Torongare) and Waikato-Tainui (Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Te Kawerau ā Maki, Ngāti Tamaoho, Te Ākitai Waiohua, Ngāti Rori-Te Ahiwaru, Ngāti Mahuta, and Ngāti Tahinga) affiliations.
Karaka has been exhibiting since 1977. Her paintings draw on diverse art-making traditions, including toi whakairo and abstract expressionism. Characterised by dazzling colour and emotional intensity, they frequently incorporate text and tie into the artist’s longstanding work advocating kaitiakitanga and tino rangatiratanga.
Works by Karaka are held by important Aotearoa institutions, such as Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua. She produced a series of paintings for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, NIRIN (2020), and the landmark Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art (2020–21) at Toi o Tāmaki.
Recent exhibitions include Matarau (2022), curated by Shannon Te Ao, at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi and Matariki Ring of Fire (2022) at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, which grew out of her 2021 McCahon House residency. A major solo exhibition, curated by Megan Tamati-Quennell, will be present by Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates, in 2024.
John Pule
b. 1962, Niue (Lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand)
When John Pule first arrived in inner city Auckland as a young adult in 1980, the formal tenets of poetry and painting were largely unknown to him. Over the next 30 years Pule would explore new directions as both writer and painter. He has since emerged as one of this country’s most recognised painters and one of the most celebrated artists of the “New Oceania”. His work is highly inventive, particularly in its adaptation of traditional Pacific art forms and is challenging and provocative in content.
Gow Langsford Gallery has represented John Pule since 1994.
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