Hawai’i Triennial 2025: ALOHA NŌ
February 15-May 4
The state’s largest, thematic exhibition of contemporary art from Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and beyond, on view for 78 days across collaborating sites of exhibition on O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i Island.
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.”
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.
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.
Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive
I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.
– Stephanie Syjuco
The Unruly Archive is Syjuco’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is "a type of forensics...what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive."
By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images.