Through a satirical resistance-training workout filmed at Kealakekua Bay, the grassroots film collective Ke Kula ʻo Piʻilani uses humor, performance, and Indigenous perspectives to confront colonial history and examine how contested sites are remembered and experienced today.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, the Hawaii-based grassroots film collective Ke Kula ʻo Piʻilani, founded by Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and Drew K. Broderick, presents a work that brings together satire, history, performance, and resistance.
The collective creates films centered on Indigenous perspectives, using moving images to challenge dominant historical narratives and reconsider how histories of colonization continue to shape contemporary life.
For the Biennial, that approach takes the form of a satirical resistance-training workout staged within a landscape carrying profound historical significance.
Resistance at Kealakekua Bay
The work was filmed along the shores of Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii.
The location is not simply a backdrop.
It is fundamental to the meaning of the project.
In 1779, the area became the site of conflict involving High Chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu and Captain James Cook, whose voyages through the Pacific became intertwined with histories of European exploration, colonial expansion, disease, and profound disruption for Indigenous communities.
By returning to this landscape through contemporary performance, the collective brings histories that can be obscured by familiar narratives of exploration back into view.
Turning History Into Performance
Rather than approaching this history through a conventional documentary format, the artists use satire.
The performance resembles a resistance-training workout.
The familiar language of physical exercise becomes a framework through which ideas about preparation, endurance, defense, and resistance can be reconsidered.
The absurdity is intentional.
By placing the recognizable visual language of a workout within a historically charged landscape, the collective creates a collision between contemporary culture and colonial history.
Humor becomes a way of opening a much more serious conversation.
Tourism and Historical Memory
Kealakekua Bay is also a contemporary tourist destination.
That reality adds another layer to the project.
Landscapes associated with violence, resistance, colonization, and Indigenous history can eventually become destinations consumed through tourism, recreation, and simplified historical narratives.
The collective draws attention to that transformation.
What happens when a site of resistance becomes a tourist attraction?
Which histories remain visible?
Which histories become softened, commercialized, or forgotten?
By staging the work directly within this environment, the artists make those contradictions difficult to separate.
Indigenous Perspectives and Colonial Narratives
The project also challenges the way colonial encounters have traditionally been narrated.
Historical accounts of Pacific exploration have often centered European explorers and their journeys.
Ke Kula ʻo Piʻilani shifts the perspective.
Instead of treating Indigenous people as secondary figures within someone else’s story, the collective places Indigenous experience, resistance, and historical memory at the center.
That change in perspective transforms the meaning of the landscape itself.
The bay is no longer simply a location associated with the arrival of Captain Cook.
It becomes a place of Indigenous history and resistance.
Humor as a Form of Resistance
Humor gives the work much of its power.
Satire allows the collective to engage difficult histories without reproducing the authoritative language through which those histories have often been presented.
The workout format initially appears playful.
But beneath that humor are questions about colonialism, survival, cultural memory, tourism, and the continuing relationship between Indigenous communities and their land.
The comedy does not erase the seriousness of the history.
It sharpens it.
History as Something Still Lived
Within the Whitney Biennial 2026, the work contributes to a larger conversation about how historical systems continue to shape the present.
Colonial history is not presented as something finished.
It remains embedded within landscapes, cultural narratives, tourism, political structures, and collective memory.
By returning performance to a historically significant site, the collective collapses the distance between past and present.
History becomes something encountered through the contemporary body.
Within the Whitney Biennial 2026, Ke Kula ʻo Piʻilani transforms satire into a form of resistance, asking viewers to reconsider how colonial history is remembered, how historically charged landscapes are commodified, and how Indigenous communities continue to live with—and challenge—the narratives imposed upon those places.
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