André Taniki Yanomami was born around 1945 in the village of Okorasipëki, at the headwaters of the Lobo d’Almada River in the Yanomami Indigenous Land, Roraima. In addition to being an artist, Taniki is a shaman—a mediator between the human and spiritual worlds in Indigenous and traditional cultures, capable of communicating with spirits, healing, and balancing visible and invisible forces through rituals, chants, and trances. Between 1976 and 1985, Taniki developed a body of drawings in dialogue with an artist, an anthropologist, and missionaries. This is the first exhibition dedicated entirely to his oeuvre, bringing together 121 drawings produced in two periods: during exchanges with the Swiss-Brazilian photographer Claudia Andujar in 1976–77, and during encounters with the French anthropologist Bruce Albert in 1978, in the villages where the artist-shaman lived. 

In the 1976–77 drawings, Taniki depicted scenes from the Yanomami worldview and funerary rituals taking place in his community. These drawings, displayed on this wall, were created using colors already employed by the Yanomami in their body painting and basketry, such as black, purple, and red. The following year, in dialogue with Albert, Taniki produced the drawings displayed on the opposite wall, recording his visions during shamanic trances. These works feature vibrant, multicolored compositions with abstract and geometric forms. They demonstrate how Taniki was spiritually and visually stimulated by the power of yãkoana, a psychoactive powder derived from the bark of an Amazonian tree. Similar to ayahuasca, it is inhaled by shamans and is said to nourish the spirits. 

In the Yanomami worldview, the notion of the image (utupë) is not only its visible apprehension, but also the inner essence that constitutes the vital core of all things. The exhibition’s title, Image Being (Në utupe, in Yanomami), refers to the spiritual movement Taniki undergoes during shamanic rituals: ceasing to be merely human to exist in the form of an image, just as spirits do. To this day, Taniki continues to fulfill his shamanic responsibilities in his community, mediating relationships between ancestral spirits and the non-shaman Yanomami. Likewise, although he no longer draws, his works continue to attest to his intermediary power, making the invisible (the spirit-images) visible (the drawing-images).

André Taniki Yanomami: Image Being is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, and Mateus Nunes, Assistant Curator, MASP