SUSPENSION DRIFT is an immersive installation of painted wallpaper, suspended scrims, video mapping, and sound. Painting and projection function as equal agents: one gathers trace, sediment, and atmosphere; the other sets the space into motion through drift, fragmentation, and fleeting alignment. The work opens a shifting field shaped by wā, a Hawaiian understanding of time-space as interval and relation, and pō, generative darkness as source and return. A planetary form emerges across layers, briefly coheres, and disperses again. Drawing from Polynesian navigation, Indonesian seafaring knowledge, and collective movement, the installation unfolds through passage rather than fixed perspective. It does not begin from a single root; it forms roots as it moves. The sublime is felt here not as distance, but as immersion in forces that remain unstable, relational, and in motion.

Artist Bio

Iwalani Kaluhiokalani is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, video, and sound. Her practice engages atmosphere, movement, and spatial perception as ways of thinking through migration, relation, and the unstable grounds of belonging. Bringing together painted surfaces, suspended architectures, moving image, and sound, she creates immersive environments in which forms emerge, disperse, and reconfigure through passage. Her work draws from Polynesian cosmologies, archipelagic imaginaries, embodied movement practices, and transoceanic histories, articulating a contemporary language of drift, translation, and reorientation.

Kaluhiokalani was born in Massachusetts to Hawaiian-Scottish and Dutch-Indonesian parents. She earned her BFA in Painting with Distinction and Departmental Honors from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she also studied dance and performance through the Studio for Interrelated Media. She later continued her movement research through Laban/Bartenieff studies at Lesley University. She currently lives and works between Boston USA and Marseille, France.