Latest news with #SantiagoYahuarcani
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Aussie dots, Tudor pots and nudist shots – the week in art
Emily Kam KngwarrayA survey of this revered Australian painter who combined modern abstraction with maps of the Dreamtime. Tate Modern, London, 10 July until 11 January Lindsey Mendick: Wicked Game The flamboyant ceramicist takes a dive into the world of the Tudors with an installation in a castle once visited by Elizabeth I. Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, 9 July until 31 October Figure + GroundMartin Creed, Sonia Boyce, Paul McCarthy and more in a group show of film and video art. Hauser and Wirth, London, until 2 August Movements for Staying AliveYvonne Rainer, Ana Mendieta and Harold Offeh star in a participatory celebration of body art. Modern Art Oxford, until 7 September Małgorzata Mirga-TasThis Roma-Polish artist portrays her community in bold and colourful textiles. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 7 September It's a marvellous night for a moondance – with the pink dolphins tripping the light fantastic with the local mermaids – in the Amazon. Peruvian artist Santiago Yahuarcani creates his works by applying paint prepared from pigments, seeds, leaves and roots, to large sheets of llanchama, a cloth made from the bark of the ojé tree. His works are often inspired by the hallucinations brought on by the ritual ingestion of tobacco, coca, ayahuasca and mushrooms – substances long used by the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon when in search of help, knowledge or revelation. His show, The Beginning of Knowledge is at the Whitworth, Manchester, as part of Manchester International festival. Read our interview with him here. Sam Cox AKA Mr Doodle is the million-dollar artist who almost lost himself to his alter ego Not all statues of footballers are as terrible as the infamous Ronaldo bust Jenny Saville's raw, visceral portraits are inspiring a fresh generation of schoolkids Indigenous art from around the world is sweeping galleries across the UK A once derelict district of Medellín, Colombia has has been rebuilt as a green haven Khaled Sabsabi will show at Venice Biennale after controversial sacking was rescinded An Allegory, by an anonymous Florentine artist, about 1500 This painting celebrates childbirth and motherhood, but subversively. Mothers were often depicted as the Virgin Mary nursing Christ in medieval and Renaissance art. It was a form of religious manipulation, associating a typical female experience of the age with piety and love of Christ. This woman however lies powerfully and calmly in a meadow while her babies play around her. It is a pagan scene, shorn of Christian symbols. In a pose apparently inspired by Botticelli's Venus and Mars, a strong, even divine maternal figure, who resembles Venus, holds sway over the onlooker. National Gallery If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Wild visions of nature and carnage fuelled by hallucinogens: Santiago Yahuarcani review
Santiago Yahuarcani is the leader of the White Heron clan of the Uitoto Nation, an Indigenous population of the Amazon basin in Peru and Colombia. He uses his work to preserve the history of his people, confront the violence they have had to endure, and fight for a future that is relentlessly under threat. In his paintings, celestial beings dance in starlight. Hybrid creatures – part-human, part-dolphin – wade through rivers. Bodies meld with nature and jungle melds with body. These dizzyingly shamanistic paintings of mythological creatures and Indigenous spiritualism are a celebration of his home, his people and his past. The show opens with three vast, chaotic paintings on traditional bark canvas, a rough, dense material that he painstakingly hammers flat with a machete. Each work is filled with a whorl of licking tongues, gawping mouths and endless hybrid creatures. A woman with webbed fingers and scales down her back gathers fish in her arms as a man inhales big clouds of smoke being puffed out by a grey figure with crab claws for hands. Rocks have eyes and teeth, birds become lizards, fish brandish spears. If it sounds like it's fuelled by hallucinogens, that's because it is: medicinal plants like ayahuasca, as well as coca and tobacco, are an integral part of Uitoto culture. Yahuarcani's wild visions are filled with references to creation myths, to the way rivers, animals and forests are carriers of memory. Spirits are everywhere, their stories passed down by elders in ritual storytelling sessions (Yahuarcani comes from a family of artists). He paints a world where man and nature flow into each other, inseparable, interrelated, interconnected. A lot of the works have a direct narrative. An image of coca and tobacco leaves tells the story of Moo Bunaima, the father creator whose tears allowed humanity to walk the earth, with those sacred plants allowing communication between the Uitoto and the divine. A figure with splayed bird feet is Juma, the heron man, Yahuarcani's first ancestor, responsible for Moo Buinaima. A painting of hands describes the way Uitoto-Aimeni counting works. A whole system of knowledge is delineated, a whole history of humanity is told, in swirling patterns of brown, red and blue. But one presence looms darkly over all of this: colonial violence. Bodies are thrust into a pit of fire by figures brandishing machine guns in one painting. A woman bleeds an endless stream of white fluid in another. More than 30,000 Indigenous people died between 1879 and 1912 at the hands of the Peruvian Amazon Company. It brutally exploited the people and the land for profit, and the pain of those atrocities – experienced directly by Yahuarcani's grandfather – endures in these paintings. More modern threats appear too, as Covid is depicted as a furry monster ravaging the world. But throughout all of this shocking imagery, Yahuarcani's work is still filled with leopards, crocodiles, pink dolphins and gods, figures resisting, fighting the onslaught of exploitation and violence. These fantastical creatures represent his land, his people, his history all surviving despite the adversity they've faced. Yahuarcani's work is intricate, detailed, colourful and passionate. It tells important, powerful stories, and it tells them urgently. But you have to tread a fine line here, being careful not fetishise the work or Yahuarcani's background – yet at the same time, you can't just view it all through the lens of western art history. It's not good because it looks like western painting, and it's not good just because it tells a story that's incredibly affecting. It's good because it's relevant, because it's emotional, because it's an artist using painting as a tool of survival, endurance and communication. At a time when Indigenous cultures are increasingly under threat, Yahuarcani's work feels necessary, crucial. It doesn't hurt that it's also deeply beautiful and hugely moving. Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge is at the Whitworth, Manchester, until 4 January
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘They came for our land, our wood, our gold': Santiago Yahuarcani, Peruvian painter of dancing dolphins
Santiago Yahuarcani's Amazon is no longer the place he painted as a child. The rainforest scenes of parrots, anacondas and jaguars that he and his brothers used to sell to riverboat tourists for a dollar apiece have given way to visions of a landscape that is darker, more despoiled and more desperate than it was six decades ago. However, as his first solo international exhibition – at the Whitworth in Manchester – will show, the old beauties and mysteries have not faded completely. His work is populated by shape-shifting spirits, mermaids waltzing with pink river dolphins, enormous pipe-smoking lizards and shamans who trap their adversaries in rum bottles, but they exist alongside depictions of the genocidal crimes of the past and the ecocidal crimes of the present. Oil refineries are consumed by fire, rubber trees weep tears of sap, forest spirits are displaced by drought, and memories of a century-old slaughter – replete with torn and branded flesh – echo through the forest and down the generations. 'When I was a child, there was a huge abundance of animals and fish in the Amazon,' says the 65-year-old Indigenous Peruvian painter, when we meet in Madrid, at a joint exhibition of work by him and his partner Nereyda López. 'There was a lot of land to make into farmsteads and there were a lot of animals to hunt. But people have come and taken land – hectares of land, kilometres of land – and they've come for the wood and the gold, too.' The artist and his family are all too aware of what happens when the Amazon attracts the greedy gaze of the outside world. Today, they are the last 12 members of the White Heron clan of the Uitoto nation still living in Peru. Just over a century ago, Yahuarcani's grandfather, then 16, was forced from Colombia to Peru during the genocide that was waged against the Indigenous population of the Putumayo region during the rubber boom. The painter was five or six when he learned what had happened at La Chorrera rubber station. 'My grandfather would call us together at night and tell us about the era of rubber,' he says. 'He told us how the bosses arrived with rifles and started to force the Indigenous people to collect the sap of trees for rubber. They demanded 50kg of sap from each person every two to three weeks. They gave them the materials they needed to get the sap and they gave them food, but not enough food.' Anyone coming back with less than 50kg was punished. Some were thrown into a hole 15 metres deep. Others had an ear hacked off. 'There was also a guy, my grandfather told me, who'd make everyone watch as he cut off a lump of your flesh with a knife. They wanted to scare people so they'd get their 50 kilos.' Then came the time when the bosses decided to plant sugar cane, coffee and corn for the women to harvest. 'These women worked with their babies on their backs,' says Yahuarcani. 'One baby started to cry because of the heat of the sun. The overseers came and took the little boy from his mother's back and threw him on the fire.' When the inevitable uprising took place, the response was characteristically barbaric. Men, women and children were burned alive in a large house where they had sought refuge. Those who escaped the flames were shot. 'My grandfather told me that, a month after the fire, thousands of butterflies of a kind never before seen in the Amazon began to sprout from the site,' says Yahuacari. 'All different kinds of butterflies with all different kinds of colours. My grandfather told me they were the spirits of the victims, of the people who had been burned.' Those atrocities are recounted in one painting – called The Stone-Hearted Man – that shows gangs of pale men in white hats and with pistols in their belts branding, decapitating and burning their way across a stretch of rainforest that has become a hell. All around them are the charred and broken bodies of Indigenous people. A century later, the rainforest is once again besieged. 'Today, Indigenous groups are having to fight back,' says Yahuarcani. 'We have to fight to protect our vegetation, our trees and to reforest.' But the odds are not in their favour. While more and more outsiders are coming to the Amazon in search of land, timber, gold and oil, many of the region's young people are abandoning their homes in search of education and employment. Respect for the rainforest is dwindling. Whenever they set out to hunt or fish, the Uitoto make an offering to the guardian of the forest animals: 'He's small and furry like a monkey and has the face of an 80-year-old person.' And, unlike the logging and mining corporations, they never take more than they need. 'In the Amazon,' he says, 'when we want to eat, we go to our supermarket – it's in the mountains, in the jungle, where there are fish and fruits. You bring home what you need and you don't destroy everything. God has said that man should not destroy nature, he should take care of it, because it is his home, too. You can't destroy your own house.' If the artist's subject matter has changed over the years, his techniques have not. Yahuarcani has always created his works by applying paint prepared from pigments, seeds, leaves and roots, to large sheets of llanchama, a cloth made from the bark of the ojé tree. His works are often inspired by the hallucinations brought on by the ritual ingestion of tobacco, coca, ayahuasca and mushrooms – substances long used by the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon when in search of help, knowledge or revelation. While getting llanchama requires the skills he learned from his bark-cutter grandfather, the use of hallucinogens harnesses and honours the cosmology, myths and traditions of Yahuarcani's people as he strives to draw attention to the threats they and the forest face. Perhaps the greatest of those menaces is indifference. Yahuarcani's home town of Pebas, which lies on a bend in the river as it meanders from north-east Peru towards Colombia, is as far removed as it could be from the artistic, political and media centres of the coastal capital, Lima. As a result, getting his work and its messages noticed has been a struggle. Yahuarcani is polite but insistent as he reflects on the difficulties that he and other Indigenous artists – not least his son Rember - experience when it comes to visibility and exhibition space. 'I use my work to show our myths,' he says. 'How our culture used to be, how we came to have the problems we now have. But it's been very tough because we were from the Amazon and we were Indigenous. We weren't allowed to exhibit in the museums, or do the interviews, because we were always put to one side.' Artists from Lima 'have always had more opportunities and more press'. Part of the problem, he says, lies in Peru's own view of its culture and history. 'When we were in school, we were taught about the Incas. About how the Incas built Machu Picchu, and so on. But there was nothing about us or our history, and that's been one of our complaints. Our stories aren't in the textbooks.' Yet he is adamant that this is a history people need – and want – to know about. When he exhibited a picture of the Putumayo atrocities in Lima a decade ago, 'the newspapers and the magazines were saying, 'Look at this! Look at this!' But the authorities were not at all interested.' Yahuarcani has been buoyed by the enthusiastic reaction to the Madrid show – even if it has meant braving the heat and chaos of the Spanish summer. He hopes the Manchester exhibition will be equally well received. But the recognition has been as hard won as it has been belated. Time is running out and, as one of his recent works plainly shows, the Amazon is changing rapidly and irrevocably. Painted earlier this year, Optic Fibre in the Depths of the Amazon River is a riotous, funny and faintly disturbing picture that shows dolphins, frogs, fish and turtles clutching mobile phones as technology reaches ever farther into the rainforest. One or two of the smarter fish are ringing their friends to let them know where the fishers are gathered so they can avoid them. The current cycle of expansion, encroachment and exploitation appears unstoppable. And if the forest goes then so does a branch of the Uitoto, their way of life, and their half-forgotten history. 'I hope Peru will do something about these issues,' says Yahuarcani. 'That there will be a book of these stories so young people can learn what happened to their grandparents. Today, we are the only family of the White Heron clan. There are no more. When we disappear, the White Heron ends.' Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge is at the Whitworth, Manchester, 4 July to 4 January; part of Manchester International Festival, 3-20 July.
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘They came for our land, our wood, our gold': Santiago Yahuarcani, Peruvian painter of dancing dolphins
Santiago Yahuarcani's Amazon is no longer the place he painted as a child. The rainforest scenes of parrots, anacondas and jaguars that he and his brothers used to sell to riverboat tourists for a dollar apiece have given way to visions of a landscape that is darker, more despoiled and more desperate than it was six decades ago. However, as his first solo international exhibition – at the Whitworth in Manchester – will show, the old beauties and mysteries have not faded completely. His work is populated by shape-shifting spirits, mermaids waltzing with pink river dolphins, enormous pipe-smoking lizards and shamans who trap their adversaries in rum bottles, but they exist alongside depictions of the genocidal crimes of the past and the ecocidal crimes of the present. Oil refineries are consumed by fire, rubber trees weep tears of sap, forest spirits are displaced by drought, and memories of a century-old slaughter – replete with torn and branded flesh – echo through the forest and down the generations. 'When I was a child, there was a huge abundance of animals and fish in the Amazon,' says the 65-year-old Indigenous Peruvian painter, when we meet in Madrid, at a joint exhibition of work by him and his partner Nereyda López. 'There was a lot of land to make into farmsteads and there were a lot of animals to hunt. But people have come and taken land – hectares of land, kilometres of land – and they've come for the wood and the gold, too.' The artist and his family are all too aware of what happens when the Amazon attracts the greedy gaze of the outside world. Today, they are the last 12 members of the White Heron clan of the Uitoto nation still living in Peru. Just over a century ago, Yahuarcani's grandfather, then 16, was forced from Colombia to Peru during the genocide that was waged against the Indigenous population of the Putumayo region during the rubber boom. The painter was five or six when he learned what had happened at La Chorrera rubber station. 'My grandfather would call us together at night and tell us about the era of rubber,' he says. 'He told us how the bosses arrived with rifles and started to force the Indigenous people to collect the sap of trees for rubber. They demanded 50kg of sap from each person every two to three weeks. They gave them the materials they needed to get the sap and they gave them food, but not enough food.' Anyone coming back with less than 50kg was punished. Some were thrown into a hole 15 metres deep. Others had an ear hacked off. 'There was also a guy, my grandfather told me, who'd make everyone watch as he cut off a lump of your flesh with a knife. They wanted to scare people so they'd get their 50 kilos.' Then came the time when the bosses decided to plant sugar cane, coffee and corn for the women to harvest. 'These women worked with their babies on their backs,' says Yahuarcani. 'One baby started to cry because of the heat of the sun. The overseers came and took the little boy from his mother's back and threw him on the fire.' When the inevitable uprising took place, the response was characteristically barbaric. Men, women and children were burned alive in a large house where they had sought refuge. Those who escaped the flames were shot. 'My grandfather told me that, a month after the fire, thousands of butterflies of a kind never before seen in the Amazon began to sprout from the site,' says Yahuacari. 'All different kinds of butterflies with all different kinds of colours. My grandfather told me they were the spirits of the victims, of the people who had been burned.' Those atrocities are recounted in one painting – called The Stone-Hearted Man – that shows gangs of pale men in white hats and with pistols in their belts branding, decapitating and burning their way across a stretch of rainforest that has become a hell. All around them are the charred and broken bodies of Indigenous people. A century later, the rainforest is once again besieged. 'Today, Indigenous groups are having to fight back,' says Yahuarcani. 'We have to fight to protect our vegetation, our trees and to reforest.' But the odds are not in their favour. While more and more outsiders are coming to the Amazon in search of land, timber, gold and oil, many of the region's young people are abandoning their homes in search of education and employment. Respect for the rainforest is dwindling. Whenever they set out to hunt or fish, the Uitoto make an offering to the guardian of the forest animals: 'He's small and furry like a monkey and has the face of an 80-year-old person.' And, unlike the logging and mining corporations, they never take more than they need. 'In the Amazon,' he says, 'when we want to eat, we go to our supermarket – it's in the mountains, in the jungle, where there are fish and fruits. You bring home what you need and you don't destroy everything. God has said that man should not destroy nature, he should take care of it, because it is his home, too. You can't destroy your own house.' If the artist's subject matter has changed over the years, his techniques have not. Yahuarcani has always created his works by applying paint prepared from pigments, seeds, leaves and roots, to large sheets of llanchama, a cloth made from the bark of the ojé tree. His works are often inspired by the hallucinations brought on by the ritual ingestion of tobacco, coca, ayahuasca and mushrooms – substances long used by the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon when in search of help, knowledge or revelation. While getting llanchama requires the skills he learned from his bark-cutter grandfather, the use of hallucinogens harnesses and honours the cosmology, myths and traditions of Yahuarcani's people as he strives to draw attention to the threats they and the forest face. Perhaps the greatest of those menaces is indifference. Yahuarcani's home town of Pebas, which lies on a bend in the river as it meanders from north-east Peru towards Colombia, is as far removed as it could be from the artistic, political and media centres of the coastal capital, Lima. As a result, getting his work and its messages noticed has been a struggle. Yahuarcani is polite but insistent as he reflects on the difficulties that he and other Indigenous artists – not least his son Rember - experience when it comes to visibility and exhibition space. 'I use my work to show our myths,' he says. 'How our culture used to be, how we came to have the problems we now have. But it's been very tough because we were from the Amazon and we were Indigenous. We weren't allowed to exhibit in the museums, or do the interviews, because we were always put to one side.' Artists from Lima 'have always had more opportunities and more press'. Part of the problem, he says, lies in Peru's own view of its culture and history. 'When we were in school, we were taught about the Incas. About how the Incas built Machu Picchu, and so on. But there was nothing about us or our history, and that's been one of our complaints. Our stories aren't in the textbooks.' Yet he is adamant that this is a history people need – and want – to know about. When he exhibited a picture of the Putumayo atrocities in Lima a decade ago, 'the newspapers and the magazines were saying, 'Look at this! Look at this!' But the authorities were not at all interested.' Yahuarcani has been buoyed by the enthusiastic reaction to the Madrid show – even if it has meant braving the heat and chaos of the Spanish summer. He hopes the Manchester exhibition will be equally well received. But the recognition has been as hard won as it has been belated. Time is running out and, as one of his recent works plainly shows, the Amazon is changing rapidly and irrevocably. Painted earlier this year, Optic Fibre in the Depths of the Amazon River is a riotous, funny and faintly disturbing picture that shows dolphins, frogs, fish and turtles clutching mobile phones as technology reaches ever farther into the rainforest. One or two of the smarter fish are ringing their friends to let them know where the fishers are gathered so they can avoid them. The current cycle of expansion, encroachment and exploitation appears unstoppable. And if the forest goes then so does a branch of the Uitoto, their way of life, and their half-forgotten history. 'I hope Peru will do something about these issues,' says Yahuarcani. 'That there will be a book of these stories so young people can learn what happened to their grandparents. Today, we are the only family of the White Heron clan. There are no more. When we disappear, the White Heron ends.' Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge is at the Whitworth, Manchester, 4 July to 4 January; part of Manchester International Festival, 3-20 July.
