Sara Flores and the Shipibo
Conibo Center: How to Curate
Work by Indigenous Artists
within International Exhibitions
of Contemporary Art

The Projective Drawing
Austrian Cultural Forum, New York
06.02.18 – 13.05.18

Inclusion of art by indigenous artists within conventional, thematic exhibitions and biennials of international contemporary art has a relatively short history. For centuries there has existed a division between institutions of art and those of anthropology, in which the cultural production of members of indigenous communities were relegated to the latter, and with few exceptions there was little opportunity to view indigenous art as art – meaning, within the context of art museums and galleries – and there were few opportunities for cross-cultural comparisons. The inclusion of paintings by Doreen Reid Nakamarra and work by Sámi Artist Group ( Keviselie / Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Synnøve Persen ) in Documenta 14, and Inuit artists such as Kananginak Pootoogook in the most recent Venice Biennale, are just some examples from the past decade of a marked shift, in both perspective and practice, within contemporary curating. The Projective Drawing at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City is a recent contemporary art exhibition, which included work by an indigenous artist. This review positions the exhibition as a case study within this short history, and examines the progress and pitfalls of curating work by indigenous artists within international contemporary art exhibitions.

The Projective Drawing was an exhibition of contemporary drawing curated by the Drawing Center’s director, Brett Littman. It featured work by international artists whose sensorial qualities required an alternative framework of interpretation to conventional methods centred on visual perception and disinterested aesthetic appreciation. Through drawings by artists such as Katrin Sigurdardóttir and William Cordova, the exhibition probed how to conceive of an understanding that accommodates all sensations that influence one’s perception and experience of drawing – a practice that can be traced back to prehistory, and across all cultural divides.

The exhibition adapted its title and premise from The Projective Cast ( 1995 ), a book by the historian Robin Evans, which posed the same question about architecture. In The Projective Drawing, the curatorial premise explored how to accommodate approaches to drawing ( and art-making in general ) that are not typically represented in museum spaces – practices that reference cultures and traditions with aesthetic qualities and gestures, but that, for understanding, require a concerted shift in ideological and perceptive frameworks. That question of how to present drawing that comes out of spiritual practice, in a way that accounts for, and makes visible, its status as part of a ritual rather than an aesthetic object produced in the Western tradition, was especially pertinent to the exhibition’s central installation: three drawings by Sara Flores, the only indigenous artist included in the presentation, which was installed with an immersive sound installation by the Shipibo Conibo Center.

Flores was born in 1950, in the indigenous community of Tambomato, in the Loreto region of the Peruvian Amazon. At the age of fourteen she began an apprenticeship with her mother, who taught her how to produce pigments from natural flora, and how to create forms, freehand, that related to the icaro, or spiritual magic, which accompanied various shamanic rituals of the rainforest. Flores developed a style of hypnotic, pattern-like drawing, which she used to produce even, overall compositions, interpreted from music and sounds of the rainforest. Flores met the researchers and artists who started the Shipibo Conibo Center in New York, while they were conducting academic and artistic fieldwork in Peru; they began to collaborate on developing ways of presenting Flores’s work, for exhibition to audiences in the United States.

For The Projective Drawing, the Shipibo Conibo Center stretched three of Flores’s drawings on raw canvas onto wooden stretchers, and hung them together on two perpendicular walls, in classic museological fashion. They created a responsive sound component for the installation, using their field recordings of the rainforest. Inside the installation, they placed a microphone and installed two speakers above the drawings. A wall text next to the two-wall installation encouraged visitors to speak into it, to elicit a ‘response’ from the rainforest and thus conjure up an image of the context to which Flores’s work referred.

How Flores’s drawing related to ceremony, whether or not there was a historic significance to the patterns, and whether there was any significance in the repetition of the patterns and the experience of hallucinogens, were all questions to which the exhibition did not provide any information or answers. There was only a wall text, encouraging visitors to say ‘ohm’ into the central microphone, which conjured up a stereotypical, and generic, image of a non-Western ceremony. These kinds of details positioned Flores’s drawings – the only works created outside the framework of Western traditions – as the work of an exceptional Other.

This responsive sound component turned Flores’s presentation of drawing into an immersive, multimedia installation, which staged a recreation of but one element of the ceremonial experience. For one thing, the sonic translation into stereo speakers of the entire sound world of a chorus of forest creatures literally flattened everything out and gave visitors a false understanding of what would certainly have been a highly sensory experience, involving humidity, hallucinogens and a historically-rooted practice of healing. There was no mention, for instance, of what the shamanic ceremonies that related to Flores’s patterns were for, or how ‘healing’ was understood in Shipibo culture. Nor was it clear whether the act of making the drawings was done as part of a ceremony, or whether the finished drawings played a role within the ceremony, or both. The call and response element of the work turned the installation into something of a game, to create a reaction, yet that reaction didn’t seem to have any generative function beyond illustrating the point in the wall text – that the works were to be understood as sharing a kinship with a natural habitat.

Such lack of precision is common when artists of indigenous identification are presented in Western institutions, but it leaves viewers to fall back on preconceived ideas and images: just pictures, drugs, forest, animals and a woman making drawings – most of them, images that would have been familiar to people from Hollywood movies or the National Geographic Magazine. Precision and specificity are the only elements that might be capable of recuperating work such as Flores’s from the assimilating function of the white cube.

When thinking about how to present contemporary indigenous art in museums, a good comparison and historical precedent is the case of aboriginal contemporary art in Australia. That there is a large market for abstract aboriginal painting and a willingness to include this work in major contemporary art biennials may be traced back to the work of the art teacher Geoffrey Bardon, who worked with aboriginal Papunya peoples in a government settlement in the early 1970s. He provided Western materials ( construction paper, tempera paint, etc. ) and was amazed at what the Papunya men created from these. They reproduced patterns related to ceremony, in which art-making had a spiritual utility, and transposed them to murals and drawings, related to their tradition but largely divorced from their function. The transposition of one format to another ( e.g. a mark on a tree bark vs. the same mark on paper – or even removing the actual bark from the tree to display it in the same fashion as a traditional Western drawing ) was a tacit metaphor for the violence inherent in the process of assimilation.

Everywhen, an exhibition held at the Harvard Art Museums in 2016, which was based on aboriginal conceptions of time, showed an eternal present that could not be separated from past or future: the curators placed contemporary aboriginal drawings next to traditional ceremonial objects, but didn’t account for the translation of ceremonial drawing to contemporary art drawing. How to do that in space is a difficult question; it might be useful to offer a comparison between historic use and present use, instead of making comparisons between the drawing’s historic use and present status, as art objects. The latter procedure gives the false impression that ritual objects are a product of the past, and contemporary drawings a product of the present.

Flores’s inclusion within an exhibition of contemporary art is a productive step in the long history of showing indigenous art in Western museums, which, until recently, relegated the work of indigenous peoples to the status of ahistoric and anonymous, functional objects for anthropological study. Although there has been much effort in art museums in North America over the past ten to fifteen years to exhibit work by indigenous artists, exhibitions such as The Projective Drawing mark a more recent shift to considering contemporary indigenous art next to work by Western contemporary artists – and should be celebrated for this. Yet within this productive development, curatorial practice has yet to work out how to make visible the differences between cultures in ways that do not ‘other’ the indigenous artist, but rather how to present artists within Western institutions on an equal basis – one that would recuperate and remind people within a global, neo-liberal society of the infinite ways that human beings have lived and continue to live, and conceive of time, art, healing and other cultural practices that are being rapidly foreclosed as a result of deforestation, climate change and the expansion of neo-liberal economic policies.