Pewa Radio
Pewa Radio is an audio cast made by UH Mānoa ART students in response to Hawai‘i Triennial 2025—the state’s largest, thematic exhibition of contemporary art from Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and beyond. The episodes of Pewa Radio are inspired by the theme of this year’s exhibition, ALOHA NŌ, meaning to love deeply, and the mau pewa, an iconic symbol used as the kahako over the o in ALOHA NŌ’s visual identity. The pewa is a fishtail shaped patch used to repair and strengthen wooden objects. In the context of ALOHA NŌ, it reminds us of one of the most important functions for art is to heal wounds of the land, water, culture, heart, and mind. Healing is an ongoing process that makes us stronger, not a Band-Aid. As Hawai’i Contemporary puts it, ”To create a pewa is to truth tell. To create a pewa is to seek connection in vulnerable histories and difficult jagged places. To create a pewa is to reinforce the fabric of community.” Taking the mau pewa to heart, the students centered their audio episodes on an individual artwork presented in HT25, asking how it addresses the fissures, cracks, or rifts in the social fabric. Pewa Radio amplifies both artist and audience voices. Some of the episodes feature student conversations with select HT25 artists. Others simply feature the artist talking about their work in relation to healing. Others feature short three-to-five-minute conversations amongst a few students about a single art work. And still others are one-to-three-minute solo meditations.
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Saturday Jun 14, 2025
Saturday Jun 14, 2025
For the tenth episode, PEWA RADIO features a special multivocal response to Yazan Khalili’s Against Total Meaning created by Tiffany Beam in collaboration with Kenji Cataldo. This piece was designed as a sonic overlay made of recordings collected by participants who responded to these three sequential prompts:
Prompt 1: Move through Yazan Khalili’s installation. Let Khalili's words take hold where they will. Sense them before you make sense of them.
Prompt 2: Sound the text (recorded). Read the prose out loud as an event of solidarity and relation.
Prompt 3: Partake in collective rhythm. Read the prose aloud with me and others. Speak not in unison, but in resonance. No recording, only the lived duration of our shared presence and breath.
We count our words / As death becomes the logic of the world in which our eyes are wide open witnessing its unfolding pain growing over our lives while being shielded by the powers that reign over us like a rain that never stops pouring the cold rhetoric of the state that creates the horrors that seep through the cracks of our human fabric that is slowly squashing our souls under the voracity of colonial hands and structures that feed / On our lives and dreams while we know deep / In our hearts / That we are bond to the lands beneath our feet that we belong to the depth of its soils refusing the dance of power by rising with our art and poetry to resist the ruins of the technology / Of their force that / Turns the cultures of our worlds into ashes that they craft as we reach the moment of truth that insists on the art that refuses silence and the poetry that rejects total meaning of their artificial intelligence that devours the knowledge that we have been keeping in our everyday lives / While reclaiming our political agency / As we sit like a mountain that stands against the history of the prevailing powers that wishes to swallow the unbreakable bond between the land and us as we defy the reflections of the mirrors of atrocities in which we know that / Palestine is the / Front while the world is the battle ground as
You can find information on Khalili's installation here.
The piece honors the anti-determinist, self-creative currents of Palestinian revolutions, defined not by a march towards the state form or other decisive ends, but by open-endedness. May we similarly meet at this level of process and living relations. And may the resulting multivocality make audible the call for a Free Palestine as an uncontainable invocation for collective liberation. This sonic experience is best encountered with headphones.