Eviction Notice
CONTACT Zone
Honolulu Museum of Art School
April 6-21, 2018
Beyond this unmarked gate in South Maui are Monsanto test fields. At the end of an otherwise innocuous dead-end street and adjacent to a foreign-trade zone, a large surveillance camera looms, ready to record any trespassers.
Hawai‘i is the center of biocolonialism, a ‘contact zone’ between the experimental genetically engineered crops of multinational agrochemical seed corporations and Indigenous practices of sustainable agriculture. On islands where around 90 percent of food is imported, large parcels of land are being used for nothing other than pesticide testing territories.
Riffing off Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective series in which he gives the finger to iconic monuments, this work suggests power is not as obvious in a globalized world. Residents on Maui voted to evict Monsanto in 2014, but the law has still not been enacted, thanks to a litany of judicial injustices and monetary sway over political (in)action.
