ExhibitionJuly 7, 2023
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe: All This Is Us. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP)
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe: All This Is Us is part of MASP's 2023 program devoted to Indigenous Histories. The exhibition is curated by André Mesquita, Curator, and David Ribeiro, Curatorial Assistant, and will be on view until September 24th, 2023.
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Sheroana, Venezuela, 1971) is a Yanomami artist producing drawings, monotypes, and paintings since the 1990s. His abstract and minimal artistic language uses straight lines, organic curves, dots, circles, triangles, zigzags, arcs, and crosses. Hakihiiwe lives in Mahekoto-Theri, a Yanomami community in the city of Alto Orinoco, in the Venezuelan state of Amazonas, which borders the Brazilian states of Roraima and Amazonas. The artist actively watches nature and the daily life of his community, recording in a notebook what he finds, learns, and uncovers in body and face paintings, shamanistic chants, traditional knowledge about animals, the medicinal aspects of plants, as well as the patterns his people use in their material culture. These notebooks are like archives, which help Hakihiiwe collect his visual memories of life in the forest. His notes are later transferred to sheets of paper, where he adds colors, patterns, repetitions, and textures. Most of the drawings and monotypes in this exhibition were produced on handmade paper with fibers such as sugarcane, cotton, mulberry, banana, and corn.
With 48 works, this show bears the subtitle Ihi hei komi thepe kamie yamaki [All This Is Us], proposed by Hakihiiwe to embody the diversity of elements that form his community and its surroundings. For the artist, "All this is us" means "all that is there in the jungle. We all live there, and it's not just us. There are big rivers, big lagoons, all the animals, and the insects. I recover everything that is there where I live."
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Sheroana, Venezuela, 1971) is a Yanomami artist producing drawings, monotypes, and paintings since the 1990s. His abstract and minimal artistic language uses straight lines, organic curves, dots, circles, triangles, zigzags, arcs, and crosses. Hakihiiwe lives in Mahekoto-Theri, a Yanomami community in the city of Alto Orinoco, in the Venezuelan state of Amazonas, which borders the Brazilian states of Roraima and Amazonas. The artist actively watches nature and the daily life of his community, recording in a notebook what he finds, learns, and uncovers in body and face paintings, shamanistic chants, traditional knowledge about animals, the medicinal aspects of plants, as well as the patterns his people use in their material culture. These notebooks are like archives, which help Hakihiiwe collect his visual memories of life in the forest. His notes are later transferred to sheets of paper, where he adds colors, patterns, repetitions, and textures. Most of the drawings and monotypes in this exhibition were produced on handmade paper with fibers such as sugarcane, cotton, mulberry, banana, and corn.
With 48 works, this show bears the subtitle Ihi hei komi thepe kamie yamaki [All This Is Us], proposed by Hakihiiwe to embody the diversity of elements that form his community and its surroundings. For the artist, "All this is us" means "all that is there in the jungle. We all live there, and it's not just us. There are big rivers, big lagoons, all the animals, and the insects. I recover everything that is there where I live."
Gallery
