Abstract
In November 2023, the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo Biennial Foundation, FBSP) proudly announced the Brazilian curatorial project for the 2024 Biennale di Venezia. For the first time the country is exhibiting the work of indigenous artists, including Glicéria Tupinambá, curated by three indigenous art professionals, Arissana Pataxó, Denilson Baniwa and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana. The exhibition titled Ka’a Pûera: nós somos pássaros que andam (Ka’a Pûera: we are birds that walk) discusses issues of marginalization, deterritorialization, and violation of territorial rights, and invites reflection on concepts such as resistance and the shared essence of humans, birds, memory, and nature. To mark the occasion, Brazil’s geometric pavilion at the Giardini, which previously epitomized the country’s modernist tradition associated with abstract geometry, will be renamed Pavilhão Hãhãwpuá (an indigenous patxohã word meaning “ancestral territory”).
The exhibition Ka’a Pûera gives international visibility to the on-going incorporation of indigenous art in Brazilian art history and art market. This paper departs from an analysis of this upcoming exhibition, and also considers a series of exhibitions that have included indigenous art since the 1970s in order to map how cultural institutions, exhibitions, and the art market have shaped recent (Brazilian) art history and the way we view, examine, and discuss non-Western art.