The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

103 ARTISTS Battle fatigue (detail) 2018 Silver gelatin collage with iron nails / 182 x 81 x 2.5cm / Image courtesy: The artist Kanaka Māoli Born 1966, Pū'ahu'ula, O'ahu, Hawai'i Lives and works in Pū'ahu'ula Kapulani Landgraf is a photographer, historian and healer. Her photographs, poetic texts and meticulously constructed collages engage with the landscapes of her native Hawai'i, a land known for its natural beauty and familiar through centuries of tourist images of swaying palms, 'dusky maidens' and lei. Landgraf’s collages in APT9 physically pull apart this image, identifying — in stark black, white and red — sites that have been devastated by development, tourism and foreign values. In the spirit of the careful custodianship of her ancestors, Landgraf pieces these sites back together, repopulating them with references to their attendant ancestral values. Born and raised in Pū'ahu'ula, Kane'ohe, on the windward side of the island of O'ahu, Landgraf has lived her whole life in the ‘place’ to which her works respond. During the 1990s, she spent seven years trekking with her large-format camera to hundreds of remote and sacred sites throughout the islands, where she documented important shrines, petroglyphs, fish traps and rock art. According to Landgraf: When you have the whole place to yourself, you can see the relationship that our ancestors had with the land, how mountain peaks and underwater ko'a shrines aligned. I was in awe. 1 Sadly, Landgraf has also witnessed the devastation wrought through sugar plantations, highways, military bases, ordinance testing, and commercial and tourist developments. 2 Together, these experiences have resulted in a deep sense of the importance of manifesting kuleana (connection) and responsible guardianship of the 'āina (land), as practised by her forebears. This is evident in her carefully constructed collages created over two-and-a-half decades. One of her earliest collages, White Woman 1994/2018 laments the culling of manō (sharks) following attacks on swimmers during the 1980s. In some Hawaiian families, sharks are considered ‘aumākua (ancestral gods). Landgraf’s collage shows three large white pointers emerging from traditional Polynesian wood carvings and gasping for air. A wave of text, issuing from a group of European missionaries at the base of the image, threatens to engulf the sharks. A reference to the imposition of foreign values and beliefs, the work also comments on the way in which language has been used as a means of conquest throughout history. Embedded in the layers of the more recent Lele Wale (to leap for no reason) 2016–18 is the story of the land of Kaka'ako, once home to an abundance of fish ponds, salt pans and wetland taro that prospered among a number of sacred burial grounds. When the offshore area of Kewalo was dredged in the 1920s to create Honolulu Harbor, the material was used to fill in the land of Kaka'ako. Almost 50 years later, this concealed spiritual hinterland was designated as Hawai'i’s first development district — the breeding ground for ‘ultra-luxury’, high-rise condominiums intended for sale at exorbitant prices to foreign investors. In Ho'okuleana (to give responsibility) 2016–18, Landgraf’s dramatic composition leads the eye into a central gate via pipes that divert fresh water from streams to foreign-owned sugar and pineapple plantations. From this locked gate, displaced red fish mingle with falling missile shapes, which are inscribed with the names of sites used for target and bombing practice by the US army and navy since the 1920s. Landgraf repeatedly uses the red fish as an omen of imminent and portentous events — in this case a warning against continued military operations and the misappropriation of water as a commodity by private land owners and profit-minded companies. In all of Kapulani Landgraf's works, the process of layering is significant to the ‘history’ of the final work and its complex subject matter. Hawai'i’s postcard paradise is literally cut up, with colonial ideas of partitioning and rationally separating things reconfigured as an elegy to what indigenous Hawaiians — Kanaka Māoli — have lost. Ruth McDougall Endnotes 1 The artist, quoted in Naomi Sodetani, ‘Forbidden places’, Star Bulletin , Section 6, 14 December 2003, <http://archives.starbulletin . com/2003/12/14/features/index.html>, viewed February 2018. 2 Landgraf and fellow photographer Mark Hamasaki spent 20 years researching newspaper articles, microfilm, archival field notes and community hearings, as well as eight years in the field capturing the devastation to traditional lands and lifestyles by the construction of the H-3 interstate highway on O'ahu. This is documented in Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf, Ē Luku Wale Ē , 'Ai Pōhaku Press, Honolulu, Hawai'i, 2015. Kapulani Landgraf