Denilson Baniwa
Pajé Jaguar

Denilson Baniwa is an artist of the Baniwa people – from the village of Darí in the northwest of the Amazon region, along the Rio Negro and its tributaries – now based in the city of Niterói, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is concerned with the conflict between Western hegemonic worldviews and the practices of Amazonian ancestral communities. He makes performances, documented through photography and film, which are informed by the traditions and current lived experiences of Amazonian ancestral communities. His works blend manifestations of Indigenous and Western popular cultures – objects, iconographies and more – so as to critique colonialist narratives and perspectives.

Baniwa emphasises the role of images in reinforcing stereotypical viewpoints of Indigenous peoples, addressing the difficulties involved in representing identity when looking through a Eurocentric gaze. He subverts and reframes iconic Western imagery to reveal the concealed racial biases that have shaped how Indigenous peoples have historically been portrayed.

Baniwa uses an anthropophagic methodology in his art. In Brazil, anthropophagy was a ritual wherein the victors in war ingested captured warriors, thereby absorbing their powers. The artist disputes colonial logics through an Indigenous cosmogony, appropriating and transforming Western artistic styles to enhance the capacity of his own culture to gain independence from that of the European colonisers.

This exhibition features two sets of works in which the artist embodies Pajé Jaguar, a Baniwa shaman. Pajé Jaguar comments on commercial agricultural practises in Brazil and beyond, which promote extensive deforestation. Pajé Jaguar also protests the broad lack of Indigenous art in museums and international exhibitions such as the Bienal de São Paulo. The works demonstrate the necessity of Indigenous knowledge in developing environmentally conscious approaches to land use, and promote the revamping of the Western-dominated cultural canon to position Indigenous knowledge at the core of all human pursuits.

The exhibition is produced by SIRIUS in collaboration with the Colégio das Artes of the Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, and curated by Nelson Ricardo Martins in dialogue with Miguel Amado, Director, SIRIUS.