Community/Nation/Tribe: ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi / Hawaiʻian Native
Materials/Processes: Video Game Design; Audio Art; Digital Image-making
Themes: Indigenous futurism; (re)Historying; Stories; Land relationships
Online Resources:
- https://www.kauwilamahi.com/
- https://kanaeokana.net/portfolio-items/ao-hou-new-world/
- https://www.indiecade.com/wao-kanaka/
Statements/Bios in Artists’ Words:
Daniel Kauwila Mahi is an ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi visual artist, researcher, video game designer, and composer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi who has exhibited art internationally in places such as Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, Canada, and the United States. Kauwila’s work embodies genealogical rhythms of sovereignty, solidarity, ceremony, and contested governance through ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. They have served as a sound designer and sound design mentor in award winning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi Video Games, He Ao Hou and Wao Kanaka, and have won the Jim Winters Award for 3-Dimensional Design for their piece Kuikawalakii in Honolulu Museum of Art’s Bi-Annual show Artists of Hawaiʻi 2021.
Kauwila has also been a Hawaiian language translator for multiple universities and Indigenous community histories across Turtle Island while mentoring both graduate and undergraduate students in translation theory and praxis. Kauwilaʻs work resides in the margins of Aloha ʻĀina traversing an Indigenous future, while refusing state-sponsored, violent reproductions of militourism and missionary descendants. Through their work they interpolate and remix ancestral chants, stories, acoustemologies, and instrumentation underscoring the rhythm of the underbelly of Hawaiʻi. Kauwila credits his matriarchal genealogy of lei makers, feather workers, and Hawaiian Sovereignty photographers for the accolades they have received.
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