Rebecca Belmore Appears at Hawai’i Triennial 2025

Celebrated artist Rebecca Belmore recently debuted a new work as part of Hawai’i Triennial 2025 (HT25).

Titled Flood, the large-scale photograph delivers a stunning meditation on displacement, class privilege and land sovereignty, says Daina Warren, curator and Executive Director, Indigenous Initiatives at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU).

“My reading is that the work was inspired by situations across Canada where land has been appropriated for use in resource extraction. In particular, the damming of waterways that result in the flooding of communities and scattering of people,” says Daina, a professional colleague of Rebecca’s who travelled with her to O’ahu to attend the exhibition’s opening celebrations. “There is also an emphasis on how these events affect people of specific classes and in specific regions, particularly in the country’s north.”

Rebecca, an internationally acclaimed artist whose work explores the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, received an Honorary Doctorate from ECU in 2018.

HT25 centres around “aloha nō.” The theme explores the complexities of aloha, a Kanaka ’Ōiwi (native Hawaiian) concept translating as “the genesis of all things,” according to a directorial statement in the exhibition brochure.

“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,” write the exhibition’s curators. “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.”

Now in its fourth edition, the Hawai’i Triennial began as the Honolulu Biennial. Since then, the exhibition has grown to include venues on Maui and Hawai’i Island in addition to spaces outside of Honolulu on O’ahu.

Rebecca’s work appears at the Capitol Modern, Hawaii’s State Art Museum, which offered the strongest showing of any of the venues on the island, Daina says. The work itself is hung close to offerings from artists working in Canada’s north and from Indigenous communities in Hawai’i, with several of the works referring to death and traumatic histories.

“It was an amazingly beautiful, but very solemn, area of the museum,” she says, adding Rebecca’s work resonated with attendees.

The museum’s location within the state capital provides additional, rich historical context for consideration. It sits mere steps from both the Hawaiian State Capitol building and ʻIolani Palace, where the last sovereign Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, was imprisoned during the United States’ annexation of the islands in the 1890s. Viewed at this nexus of institutional and historical complexity, the works in HT25 take on a renewed poignancy, Daina says.

The connection between Indigenous communities in Hawai’i and on Canada’s West Coast was also a subject of conversation, she adds. A Kanaka ’Ōiwi acquaintance she recognized from past conferences referred to documented histories of trade and cultural exchange stretching back centuries if not longer.

“She validated that their communities would come all the way up to the West Coast Indigenous communities to trade,” Daina says. “She talked about how there’s always been salted salmon in their histories and in their dietary menu because of those connections. And like Indigenous territories here, Hawai’i is unceded. Colonialism has affected their communities in very similar ways to what’s happening in Canada. She gave us some incredible oral storytelling and creation stories.”

Through this lens, Rebecca’s presence at HT25 engages in a tradition of reciprocity and solidarity as old as history itself, Daina says.

Visit the Aboriginal Gathering Place online and follow them on Instagram to learn more about their wide range of programming and resources.