The Images Remain. But Will Their World?

Sara Flores, Kené on textile. Photo: Simone Liliane / CC0 1.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

DOKUNST Redaktion

At the age of 76, Sara Flores has reached a point in her biography that the international art world would ordinarily frame as a success story. The Shipibo-Konibo artist is currently representing Peru at the 61st Biennale di Venezia, has exhibited with White Cube in London, Paris, and New York, and in 2025 was the subject of the first solo exhibition devoted to an Indigenous woman artist at the Museo de Arte de Lima. Now, The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, a documentary by Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi, has celebrated its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film follows Flores between the Amazon, exhibitions, and the international art world without reducing her story to the familiar narrative of a long-overlooked artist who has finally been discovered.

For what now appears in museums and galleries as the work of Sara Flores also belongs to a far older body of knowledge: kené, the complex visual system of the Shipibo-Konibo, whose geometric structures have been transmitted matrilineally across generations and which, for Flores, is not ornament but the expression of an order of the world. Her lines are drawn freehand on wild cotton cloth, using pigments derived from leaves, bark, berries, and other materials from the Amazon. That these images have now entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art changes their institutional status. It does not yet explain what, along with them, has actually arrived there.

This is precisely where the story becomes more complicated. Flores works with her daughters and granddaughters; her knowledge is individual yet inherited, her authorship personal and at the same time part of a collective tradition. As early as 1976, she co-founded Maroti Shobo, the first Shipibo women’s cooperative, and today the proceeds from her art support not only her family but also organisations advocating Indigenous self-determination and the protection of their territory. At the same time, the very global art world that now pays close attention to this cultural heritage has carried Flores into the realm of luxury: for Dior, she translated her visual language into a limited edition of the Lady Dior. One may see this as cultural visibility or as commercialisation; either interpretation on its own would probably be too simple. More significant is that Flores herself understands the international circulation of her work as a political instrument. The film therefore shows her not only at exhibition openings but also alongside Indigenous guardians protecting the Amazon from illegal logging and incursions into their territory. This fundamentally changes the question: not whether a traditional image should be allowed to enter a gallery, but what happens to its meaning once it arrives there.

Perhaps this is where the real paradox of this late success lies. The international art world has become remarkably adept at absorbing cultural forms that it long relegated to its margins. It can collect kené, exhibit it, contextualise it academically, and inscribe it into the canon of contemporary art. The more difficult question is whether such recognition can also protect the world that made the work possible in the first place. At the Biennale, the Peruvian Pavilion explicitly describes Flores’s work as a connection between ancestral knowledge and sustainable futures; in the film, however, the threat is very much of the present: deforestation, illegal logging, and mounting pressure on the Shipibo-Konibo’s living environment. There is also a more intimate form of impermanence. Flores’s hands are beginning to suffer from cramps and the effects of age, even though it is precisely the meticulous precision of those hands that has sustained her kené over decades. Her daughters and granddaughters continue the work. Perhaps this is the decisive perspective opened up by The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs: a culture is not saved simply because its images have entered the museum. It is preserved only when the conditions under which those images can continue to mean something are preserved as well.

Impressum

Angaben gemäß § 5 TMG:

Esteban Velazquez v. Wilhelm

Badergraben 16 04808 Wurzen

Kontakt:

Verantwortlich für den Inhalt nach § 18 Abs.2 MstV:

+49 15776999372

Esteban Velazquez v. Wilhelm

info@dokunstmag.de

www.dokunstmag.de

Badergraben 16 04808 Wurzen

Datenschutz