In recent years, several exhibitions held abroad have featured Indigenous people from Brazil and Latin America, giving unprecedented visibility to artists historically erased by gallery owners and museums.
Some examples include Siamo Foresta in Milan; The Yanomami Struggle in New York, and BEĨ: Benches of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples in Japan.
According to curators, the works transcend a mere aesthetic vision, being deeply connected to each people’s cosmologies, in addition to taking political and socioenvironmental issues into museums and galleries.
The art market is moving closer and closer to Indigenous villages. In recent years, several exhibitions have been held abroad that focused on Indigenous peoples from Brazil and Latin America, giving unprecedented visibility to their artists, historically erased by gallery owners and museums.
At this time of high demand for Indigenous art, Europe is also debating how colonialism usurped Amerindian culture and wrongly appropriated its artifacts. An example is the 16th-century Tupinambá mantle at the National Museum of Denmark, which will be returned to Brazil after three centuries in the institution’s collection. A late reckoning.
Such renewal in the circuit shows how art and politics are inseparable, and it may guide exhibitions and change curators’ colonial thinking. This is the case of Siamo Foresta, an exhibition that opened at Milan’s La Triennale in June, gathering works by 27 artists related to the Amazon Rainforest. They include Indigenous collectives such as the Yanomami Group, one of the best known in the country, with artists such as André Taniki, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Vital Warasi and Joseca Mokahesi.
This is the collective’s second international exhibition in 2023, after The Yanomami Struggle, at The Shed culture center in New York in February. Alongside the work of photographer Claudia Andujar, who has documented changes in the Yanomami Territory for 50 years, the artists showed, in the largest U.S. city, the struggle of a people who have recently faced one of their worst humanitarian tragedies.
French anthropologist Bruce Albert, the exhibition’s curator, pointed out in a statement to the press that “Siamo Foresta stages an unprecedented encounter between thinkers and defenders of the forest; between Indigenous … and non-Indigenous artists.” The exhibition “draws its founding inspiration from this aesthetic and political vision of the forest as an egalitarian multiverse of living beings, human and non-human and, as such, offers the vibrant allegory of a possible world beyond our anthropocentrism.”