Ahilapalapa Rands: practising Hawaiian culture across the sea
29 May 2024
This article was first published on RNZ's website, and the interview went to air on Culture 101, 19 May 2024.
This article was first published on RNZ's website, and the interview went to air on Culture 101, 19 May 2024.
Over 100 years ago artist Ahilapalapa Rands’ great-grandfather, the ukulele virtuoso Ernest Ka’ai wrote the song Across the Sea, the lyrics speaking to the pull that Hawai’i has for Kānaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiians) living elsewhere.
Born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, Rands is of Kānka Maoli, Samoan, Cook Islands and Pākehā descent. She is then truly of the Pacific. In her latest installations at Pātaka Museum in Porirua, Across the Sea, she explores the connections across TeMoana-nui-a-kiwa, the Pacific ocean to Hawai’i.
Listen to the RNZ interview with Mark Amery HERE.
In a large garden at the family orchard in Te Tai Tokerau, Aotearoa New Zealand a range of plants from Hawai’i, including the lush foliage used for lei-making, has been planted.
On a series of textile banners at Pātaka Rands has embroidered plants associated with the Hawaiian gods. Rands considers the plants as metaphors for all the things that move with people, some propagating successfully, others less so. They relate to pageantry banners which have a long history in Hawai’i and are reminders of the 19th century monarchical government of the independent Hawaiian kingdom, before its overthrow and the annexation of the islands by the United States in 1897.
In another installation Rands uses video, animation, a blue tinsel curtain and the sound of the ipu (or gourd drum) to call to indigenous resistance in Hawai’i over the controversial ongoing use of a sacred site, Mauna Kea, as the the world’s largest astronomical observatory. Protestors have, for a decade, sought to prevent the construction of a proposed new giant Thirty Meter Telescope, the largest in the world.
