Hala: Weaving Knowledge and Practices

This exhibition celebrates hala (Pandanus tectorius), a plant central to traditional Hawaiian material culture and cosmology. It brings together contemporary artists, cultural practitioners, natural/cultural resource managers and scientists in Hawaiʻi to envision hopeful futures that embrace ecological and cultural resilience. The exhibition embraces the concept of makawalu - which expresses a Hawaiian sensibility of inquiry and understanding phenomena from many perspectives. In this case the exhibition brings together inquiry from many disciplines (botany, geography, anthropology) whilst also centering indigenous knowledge and practice, and embracing arts-based research and collaborations. This bringing together of different worldviews, also expressed in the concept of cosmopolitics, allows for the possibility of a creative and emergent encounter opening the doors to other worlds and ways of relating to hala.