Ahilapalapa Rands

Ahilapalapa Rands (Hawaiian, Fijian, Sāmoan, Cook Island, Pākehā) is an artist, writer, and independent curator committed to actualizing alternative forms of creative practice. Her approach disrupts dominant social narratives and worldviews through collective action, collaboration, and non-hegemonic subjectivities. Rands investigates ways in which settler colonialism has influenced and continues to influence power dynamics in the Pacific, through storytelling, performance, video installations, and reading rooms. Collectives and collaborative projects are also an important part of Rands’ multidisciplinary work.

In late 2019 Rands, alongside longtime collaborator Vaimaila Urale, established Moana Fresh in Tāmaki Makaurau and online. Moana Fresh operates as a creative community hub and a retail space dedicated to supporting and celebrating artists and makers indigenous to Moananui. Earlier that same year, Rands co-founded London-based queer-led In*ter*is*land Collective with Jess Palalagi, Jo Walsh, and Lyall Hakaraia. The group seeks to connect and collaborate with different island communities dispersed across the vast Pacific and elsewhere. Rands’ work with Moana Fresh, In*ter*is*land Collective, and New Zealand-based D.A.N.C.E art club, which she co-founded in 2008 with Vaimaila Urale, Tuāfale Tanoa‘i aka Linda T, and Chris Fitzgerald, is demonstrative of the network of relationships she sustains and is sustained by as an artist and, most importantly,
a collaborator.

In 2018 Rands presented Oceanic Reading Room, commissioned as part of Encounters, a response exhibition staged by the arts and sciences organization Invisible Dust, in reaction to the Captain Cook 250th anniversary programming in Whitby, England. Within one of the Whitby Public Library rooms, Rands provided library goers with an opportunity to research art and science from Indigenous peoples of the Pacific. The reading room gathered together maps, publications, and quotations like the one below sourced from ‘Ōlelo No‘eau—a book of Hawaiian proverbs and poetical sayings—collected, translated, and annotated by Hawaiian scholar, composer, educator, and kumu hula Mary Kawena Pukui, and an hour-long documentary by the artist, Oceanic Voices, featuring Indigenous perspectives on Captain Cook.

‘Aʻohe pau ka ʻike i ka hālau hoʻokahi.
All knowledge is not taught in the same school.
One can learn from many sources.

In Lift Off, also from 2018, Rands further considers different ways of holding, acquiring, sharing, accessing, and protecting knowledge. Projecting the ongoing and longstanding efforts of many Koa Aloha ʻĀina, the video installation, consisting of a three-channel animation with sound and tinsel, calls attention to Maunakea, Hawaiʻi, where a battle over self-determination and sovereignty continues to unfold. In Hawaiʻi, as in Aotearoa, acts of political resistance and art making often go hand in hand. As the animated videos progress, activated by the beat of an ipu heke (played by kumu hula Auliʻi Mitchell), renderings of the numerous international telescopes and observatories that have been constructed on Maunakea for over half a century ‘lift off’ from the sacred summit—a vital reminder for witnesses near and far of what a future free of scientific-colonial intrusions looks, sounds, and feels like.

Produced abroad, HT22 marks Lift Off’s long-overdue homecoming. Through the work, Rands offers an example of how to connect from a distance, in solidarity and steadfast support of an ancestral homeland, its people, and their culture. Originally commissioned for The Commute (2018), an exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin, Australia, co-curated by Léuli Eshrāghi, Freja Carmichael, Lana Lopesi, Tarah Hogue, and Sarah Biscarra Dilley, the work takes on additional layers of meaning within the context of the Bishop Museum, an institution situated between Euro-American and Native Hawaiian sciences, cultural heritage, and epistemologies.