42 x 52 cm each
The series Castigos del caucho by Santiago Yahuarcani originates in the oral memory transmitted by the artist’s grandfather, who was a survivor of the Putumayo genocide where thousands of Indigenous people were annihilated and enslaved to extract rubber from the Amazon forest between 1879 and 1912. Yahuarcani’s complex narrative paintings on tree bark highlight a long history of colonial violence against the Uitoto and other Indigenous communities. They also show the destruction of the rainforest under Western models of extraction, privatization, and development. Yahuarcani’s images meticulously depict the immense cruelty and destruction inflicted on the bodies and territories for economic profit. The works remember a history of exploitation and reclaim respect for their ancestral knowledge, calling for urgent action to prevent the devastation of the Amazon.
Santiago Yahuarcani belongs to the Aimen+ (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto people of the northern Amazon. His mother, Martha López Pinedo, was a descendant of Gregorio López, the only member of the Aimen+ ? clan who migrated from La Chorrera (today part of the Colombian Amazon) to the Ampiyacu River region (now the northern Peruvian Amazon). Yahuarcani is a self-taught painter, sculptor, and leader of the Uitoto and Bora peoples of the Ampiyacu river. His life has been dedicated to the development of art and storytelling as a form of expression. Through his work he shares the rich and complex spiritual world of the Uitotos and other Indigenous Amazonian communities. His poignant works expose the violence perpetrated against the Uitoto during the Amazon’s rubber boom (ca. 1860–1920) and the current destruction of the rainforests. Yahuarcani also reclaims the presence and force of the spirits (guardians) of the plants, trees, and animals, who are largely ignored in the modern era.
Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter...
Podcast 45: On Southeast Asian Film with Rithy Panh and Park Sungho | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints August 23, 2018 Duration: 35 mins At SeaShorts 2018 , which took place from 1 – 5 August 2018 in George Town, Penang, we caught up with Cambodian film director, screenwriter and producer Rithy Panh, and Park Sungho, programmer for S-Express Cambodia (a selection of Cambodian short films at SeaShorts), who’s also a programmer for the Cambodia International Film Festival ...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
Book Review: "The State and The Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions" | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Images courtesy of Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore April 9, 2019 By Chin Ailin (734 words, four-minute read) Commissioned by the Institute of Policy Studies of Singapore (IPS) to trace the course of cultural policy in Singapore from the 1950s to the present, The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions is a comprehensive tome that should serve as an essential text in time to come for any student’s introduction to Singapore’s arts and cultural policies...
Sideways Time by Olivia Erlanger is the result of the artist’s interest in networks, seen and unseen, financial and ecological, the collapse of which has resulted in the fracturing of a middle class American identity...
The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
The triptych Black Star Press is part of the series ‘The Black Star Press project’ initiated in 2004 by the American artist Kelley Walker...
Howardena Pindell on the Exclusion of Black Artists in the 1980s – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All January 14, 2021 1:13pm ©ARTnews Over the past several years, museums and galleries have made concerted efforts to show work by Black artists, responding to growing calls for equity...