If it was through Europe’s colonial expansion that art collecting­­—likewise botany and gardening—took off, what might it mean to engage with indigenous contemporary art at this present moment? Given that the has been an allegorical as well as material handmaiden of empire, embedded in the Western worldview, providing the moral rationalizations for the seizure of Indigenous wealth as ethnographic or folkloric art for consumption, how might an exhibit unscramble the deliberate and institutionalized apartheid that has separated Indigenous art from the contemporary setting? For long Indigenous art has existed under the indelible mark of the violence of history whilst incessantly reinventing itself through unique efforts of personal creativity. Today, Native, First Nations, and Aboriginal practitioners animate contemporary art in an increasingly pro-active way transforming the nature of Institutional Critique and cultural production. The conditions for this shift are maturing belatedly but are timely too in so far as the Western way in a frantic quest for its lost soul copes with the reality of the climate emergency it has created, while its cannibalistic voracity has begun to induce planetary nausea.

Declared Peruvian National Cultural Heritage, Shipibo-Konibo art or kené as it is named in the Panoan languagesis one of the most sophisticated functioning art styles of the Americas, characterized by designs of intricate exactitude in infinite varieties. The whole world used to be covered with designssays a Shipibo song, evoking an idealistic archetype that must be strived for. The Shipibo distinguish between menin, the craft side of art making, and shinan, its creative aspect, a visionary imagination but also strength, energy, alertness, a good memory, spiritual presence and, indeed, the very essence of life, for to die means shinan-nanqui (the thinking flees). Balanced between a cultural imperative for personal innovation and submission to the constraints of ancestral ways, the artists, activists, and healers featured in this exhibition master both menin and shinan generating realities that exist in visible and invisible forms, tapping into the ideals of an elaborate tradition to re-invent Indigenous possibilities for the future.

According to the Shipibo, kené was revealed to women alongside the use of vegetal technologies (plant medicine) and the norms of conviviality epitomized by the order of the designs. A series of interwoven myths attribute these teachings to different otherworldly beings somehow superimposed on one another. Most notable among them is the cosmic anaconda Ronín, ruler of the waters, mother of all mothers, and lunar creator of the world after the primordial Great Deluge—whose skin contains all conceivable designs. Alternatively, the knowledge of kené is owed to the plant-teachers themselves, piripiri and ayahuasca in particular whose twisted vine embodies the serpent’s second self. Kené often references the musical patterns of shamanic songs, or íkaros, and is thought of as healing design or a kind of “design medicine”, in the Shipibo language described under the symbolic designation of ronín rao (anaconda-medicine). In ways that mobilize the transformative properties of art, certain diseases are thought to be caused by harmful designs that must be unraveled and re-imprinted with orderly ones. Alongside ayahuasca and other plants, the íkaro is the agent that triggers the makeover. Whatever a curing chant does to the patient’s body after having faded away in its sonic manifestation, it is said to continue working there, by assuming the form of a geometric pattern that penetrates and settles in order to bring about the spiritual transformation of a treatment. 

"Maya maya banking..." goes the refrain of an íkaro that evokes a form of moving forward by means of a reptilian sinuous movement of twisting and turning. Perhaps an appropriate reference for paths that may help us break from the ethnographic paradigms without necessarily embracing the dynamics of contemporary art, still so much a part of the colonial present. A broader comprehension of Shipibo aesthetics, medicine and ecological practice clears the way for “cosmological rehabilitation”—which is to accept Indigenous cosmovision as philosophical and political theory—in terms that today more than ever are urgent, as the linear imperative of progress and growth has brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe. 

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​Therefore, all these bending lines covering every single piece included in this exhibition are not just about a flat image, but rather a surface-breaking portal into the Shipibo multiverse, where the order of kené designs is to be understood as a visual manifesto; a commitment to the core values of Indigenous ethics, and to protocols of conviviality, reciprocity, and kinship that extends beyond the human to animal, plant, land, and water. This implies an understanding that the work of art, the work of environmental and social justice, and the struggle towards Indigenous sovereignty cannot be separated; they must move forward on the same path. ​As a result, kené designs become charged politically, as an emblem of artistic activism. They are on the flag waving over the visions of a unified Shipibo Nation; and the healing power of the patterns now extends to the territorial dimension.