Viewing room, September 2024

In our gallery viewing room this month, we are pleased to share a curation of paintings and photography by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Claudia Andujar and Paz Errázuriz. These three artists share a common thread in their extended commitments to documenting indigenous cultures throughout South America.

 

These works, spanning the 1970s to the present day, serve as records of indigenous groups and their precarious environments. Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe was born in a Yanomami community in Venezuela, and his artistic practice is a celebration of a contemporary indigenous culture. Andujar and Errázuriz’s images are the result of cautious and respectful approaches to photojournalism, developing relationships with their subjects over years of repeated visits to the communities they portray.

 

Born in a small Yanomami indigenous community in the Venezuelan Amazon, Hakihiiwe began making paper from natural fibres in the 1990s, a skill he learned by studying with the Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Drawing from the signs and symbols of Yanomami cultures, and their decorative application in basketry and body painting, his work constitutes a growing lexicon of Yanomami visual culture.

 

This vibrant series represents elements from the artist’s environment that provide both physical and spiritual nourishment for the Yanomami people, including medicinal plants, rainforest spirits and ceremonial dress.

Hakihiiwe’s work has been exhibited extensively in international institutions, projecting Yanomami culture on a global scale. Important recent exhibitions include Sheroanwe Hakihiiwe: All This Is Us, MASP, São Paulo (2023); The Yanomami Struggle, The Shed, New York, USA (2023); Chosen Memories, MoMA, New York (2023) and the 59^th Venice Biennale (2022). This Autumn, his work will be featured in Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (opening 2 November) and Amazonas: El futuro ancestral, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Spain (opening 13 November)

 

This series was included in the exhibition Stepping Softly on the Earth at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2023-24).

 

Read more:

Claudia Andujar (b. 1931, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, lives in São Paulo)

 

Claudia Andujar is recognised for her prolonged commitment to indigenous groups in the Amazon, most celebrated for her work photographing and advocating for the Yanomami people of Brazil and Venezuela over a period of five decades, from 1971 onwards. Her work with the Yanomami people has been featured in The Yanomami Struggle at The Shed, New York, USA (2023) alongside the work of Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, as well as solo exhibitions at the Barbican, London (2021) and the Fondation Cartier, Paris (2020).

 

Cateté is an image from one of the artist’s early projects, predating her Yanomami series. It celebrates the body painting practices amongst communities living on the Cateté River in Brazil. Andujar is known for her use of visual effects uncommon in documentary photography in order to visually translate cultures in which shamanism and ritual celebration play a significant role. Through close cropping, fragmenting the figures’ bodies, and dramatic chiaroscuro, Andujar creates an image that is both intimate and energetic.

 

Paz Errázuriz (b. 1944, Santiago, Chile)

 

Paz Errázuriz’s photographic practice has brought focus to marginalised communities throughout Chile. She has said about her work: ‘they are topics that society doesn’t look at, and my intention is to encourage people to dare to look.’

 

These photographs are from her series Los Nómadas Del Mar [Nomads of the Sea], originally shown at the 2018 biennial SITE Santa Fe. This series was taken on the east coast of Wellington Island in the extreme south of Patagonia. It is here that the last full-blooded Patagonian indigenous people – the Alacaluf – live. The Alacaluf were a nomadic seafaring tribe that lived in long canoes with their families. With colonization they were forced to move from their canoes and inhabit the land leaving their maritime life structures behind. During the 19th century European anthropologists and explorers, including the HMS Beagle, took some of these people as human oddities to be show abroad.

 

It took four years of repeated journeys to Patagonia for Paz Errázuriz to earn the communtiy’s trust and document this photo-essay. With respect and caution, the images document a fragile indigenous community violently segregated and threatened by extinction.