CONTACT 2017: HAWAIʻI IN A THOUSAND YEARS

CURATED BY PARADISE COVE

HONOLULU MUSEUM OF ART SCHOOL

April 1 - 16, 2017

CONTACT 3017 asks artists to take on the role of futurologists. In an increasingly hyper-globalized and technology-driven world, Hawaiʻi remains the most geographically isolated archipelago on Earth, situated more than 2,000 miles away from the nearest continental land mass. Some scholars believe that the first Polynesians arrived in the Islands from the Marquesas between one and two thousand years ago.

Dwell in predictions and prophecies. Forecast the unknown, imagine and hypothesize possible and probable (or impossible and improbable) futures in Hawaiʻi and investigate the worldviews, ideologies, and myths that support them. Climate change and rising/falling sea levels, nationalism and decentralization of power, globalization and resource distribution, are just some of the many issues we face locally and globally.

Consider the strands of the future that exist right now. How might the issues of today present themselves in a thousand years? Embrace the absurdity of that length of time. Where are we going and where will we be a thousand years from now? Will Hawaiʻi exist?

CURATORS

PARADISE COVE is a Hawaii-based collective presenting site-specific installations and art-related events. Taking its name from Paradise Cove Luau, a "must do" activity among visitors to the islands, PARADISE COVE is dedicated to facilitating temporary experiences that encourage viewers/participants to think critically about Hawaii. Particular emphasis is placed on engaging with consumer activities such as shopping, partying, and acquiring art both online and IRL.

While PARADISE COVE's core members remain static, its extended network of contributors is constantly in flux. To demarcate hard boundaries would be to overlook the importance of ambiguity. As such, the identities (ethnic, gender, personal, etc.) of individuals involved are deemphasized allowing PARADISE COVE to play a fluid role in promoting a post-identity program in the arts of Hawaii. For more information visit, www.paradisecove.biz

A STATEMENT FROM
PUʻUHONUA SOCIETY

CONTACT is our creative community’s ongoing attempt to acknowledge indigenous, kamaʻāina and settler-colonial experiences in the Hawaiian Islands. We represent many experiences – from the artist who recently arrived in our islands, to the artist whose ancestors have been here for over seventeen generations, and many in between.

We are an exercise in grassroots, experimental, non-institutional exhibition making, at once full of limitations and open to vast possibilities. Our process has become two-fold: supporting artists in their proposals of new and monumental works, while still remaining open to the creative surprises of artists who chose to work in solitude and bring their work for jurying.

3017 encouraged artists to imagine Hawaiʻi in a thousand years. Forecasting ten years (or even one hundred), may be relatively clear, but a thousand years requires imagination and vision. Who is better positioned to think creatively and critically than our artists? And who better to present possible futures, than an art collective, which at its best, is a model for interdependence, compromise, and working together as one.

We have been humbled by the commitment of this year’s curatorial team, PARADISE COVE. They ask us to join a mindset, to take in the work and to strive toward greater empathy, through art—as we look for wider, deeper and more compassionate understanding of our past and future in Hawaiʻi.

A STATEMENT FROM
PARADISE COVE

Here we have made use of everything that is behind as well as in front — for where is the future if not in the past?
I ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope. The future is in the past.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to
move away from something he is xedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin

The future is also now, and now, and now, and so on. The immediacy of our senses often distracts us from this simple notion: We are constantly moving through time into unknown futures. The future is dependent on how we each see our worlds today. We often only see the future we want to see, not necessarily the future that anyone else sees, least of all the future that will be.

Hawai‘i in a thousand years. Tomorrowland was billed by Walt Disney as “the living blueprint of our future.” We intend to break down the singularity of that “our.” The works here, from a constellation of Hawai‘i artists, provide disparate and con icting visions of what a future might be and to whom it might belong. The exhibition is intentionally contradictory; it playfully bends on, through, and around itself. At times, it is even hypocritical. We have embraced this eclecticism of form and concept as honesty and not as a breakdown of relation. We ask you to celebrate the diverse interpretations of 3017... regardless of whether or not you agree with them. The future is shared.

– PARADISE COVE