A Conversation with Denilson Baniwa
Oct
2023
Join us for an artist’s talk with contemporary Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa in conversation with curator Thiago da Costa Oliveira, scholar Juliana M. Streva, and curator Michael Dieminger, who will be moderating.
Denilson Baniwa will lead us in an engaging discussion exploring the intersection of art and activism in Brazil, offering insights into the evolving role of contemporary Indigenous artists. Reframing his artistic practice as the ‘Right of Reply’, emphasising the power of repair against national histographies and silencing of memories and stories, particularly the conversation will focus on the Brazilian context, but will also include the colonial history of the global art world and museums.
Baniwa’s diverse range of materials and practices, including digital media, canvas, installation and performance, challenge established paradigms and provide a platform for Indigenous voices to be heard and to share their stories and experiences. In this sense, Denilson Baniwa is contributing associate artist and co-curator to an upcoming exhibition dedicated to the inspirational Deseana artist Feliciano Pimentel Lana Sibé, which will feature a cycle of 70 individual works in which Lana addresses the relationship between indigenous people and white people.
Translations into German or English will be provided by Andrea Scholz and Flávia Heins to ensure that this conversation is accessible to a wider audience.
Biographies
is an Amazonian of origin from the Baniwa nation. His background is in the research of appearances and disappearances of Indigenous people in the official History of Brazil. In his artistic practice, he researches Indigenous cosmologies and their artistic representations, as a possible method of sharing ancestral knowledge. He is also interested in creating an archive of cosmologies as a way of safeguarding them.
is curator of the 99 Questions initiative at the Humboldt Forum, which is raising questions on shifting engagements on curatorial practices.
is postdoctoral associate researcher and lecturer at Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, and member of the research consortium RePLITO.
is guest-curator and associated researcher at the Ethnological Museum Berlin and the Humboldt Forum in Berliner Schloss
is curator for transcultural cooperation of the Ethnological Museum and Museum of Asian Art, Berlin.
is a Research Associate in the project Amazonia Future Lab.