Kaahupahau
Malia Osorio & D. Kauwila Mahi
2026 Visual Art Grant Recipients
This project will be rooted in the research and development of the moʻolelo of Kaahupahau. Using this ʻike, designs and pieces will be created and then printed during community gatherings where the moʻolelo will be taught and discussed relating to our world today. Participants will be encouraged to further engage with the moʻolelo and pieces via direct actions pertaining to current states of emergencies we are facing in Hawaiʻi, such as military lease expirations, and protection of ʻāina like Haleakalā, Pōhakuloa, and Mauna a Wākea.
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.
Malia Osorio is an award winning Kanaka Maoli movement artist born and cultivated in the abundant mountains of Koʻolaupoko. Malia’s commitment to anti-imperialist and internationalist struggle has led her to front lines across her Pae ʻĀina, from Kahoʻolawe to Maunakea. And beyond the vast moananuiākea to the sacred lands of Moku Honu and the simmering shores of Palestine. As a mākua (parent), Malia is invested in intergenerational movement cultural production that both attends to the most urgent issues of our times, while also planting the seeds for trees her moʻopuna will someday harvest. Malia’s work has appeared in places like Heat and Press - The Annual Honolulu Printmakers Exhibition and on the backs of activists. From digital design, to screenprinting, and everything visual in-between Maliaʻs work, like the work of all movement artists, both responds to and helps to shape our decolonial / abolitionist future of abundance.