Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe comes from the Yanomami people, and more specifically the community of Pori Pori. He was born in 1971 in Sheroana, by the banks of the Upper Orinoco in the part of the Amazon located in Venezuela. Since the 1990s he has been producing paintings based on a local perspective, focusing on rescuing and preserving the cultural heritage, ancestral traditions and links to nature of the Yanomami. His father taught him to hunt and fish, and his mother taught him the ancestral world view of the Yanomami. He usually paints on hand-crafted paper made from local vegetable fibre using techniques that he learned at the start of his career in the 1990s from Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Together, they founded a collective called Yanomami Owëmamotina (‘the Yanomami art of paper-making’), which for more than a decade produced paper for use by the community in note-books, exercise books and cards. The collective also published a couple of books. In 2001 he decided to go it alone, and since then his explorations have led him to produce work intended to record, rescue and conserve the ways of life, links with the local environment, traditions and world-view of his native people. He does this through paintings that show schematic images of local flora and fauna, often inspired by the traditional body paint patterns and basket-work decoration of his community. His work can be seen as a sort of archive of the natural and supernatural worlds of the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco, and at the same time a revindication and an expression of concern for the survival of their extraordinary natural and cultural ecosystem in the context of a globalised economy. Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe's art, with its linear, schematic style that blends firmness and delicacy, gives examples of a relationship with the environment that are essential for the preservation of his own community and for the whole world.
At the same time, his oeuvre is a living archive and a personal, intimate interpretation of the traditions and identity of his native culture, its tales, its beliefs and its interaction with nature, stemming from a capacity for observation that has been all but lost. He thus succeeds in conveying a rich, sustainable legacy of values and customs, and in imagining ways of living that are beneficial for the health of the plant and could provide alternatives to the devastating effects of globalisation, which his own community is suffering.
In recent years he has taken part in the Berlin Biennale (2019) and the 12th Shanghai Biennial (2018). At the 2019 edition of ARCOmadrid he won the Illy SustainArt Prize. In 2021 he presented a series called Urihi Theri in his first solo exhibition in Europe, at the Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon. He has also taken part in the joint exhibitions 'Amazonia' at the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (CAAC) in Seville and 'Uma História Natural das Ruínas' at Pivô in São Paulo. In 2022 his work was displayed in 'ReVision: Art in the Americas' at the Denver Art Museum and the Kunsthalle in Vienna, at the 23rd Biennale of Sidney and at the 59th Venice Biennale with 'The Milk of Dreams', curated by Cecilia Alemani.
His work can also be found in the collections of the Lima Art Museum (MALI), the British Museum in London, the Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts (CONACULTA), the KADIST in San Francisco, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Columbia College in Chicago and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (CPPC) in New York, among others.
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe comes from the Yanomami people, and more specifically the community of Pori Pori. He was born in 1971 in Sheroana, by the banks of the Upper Orinoco in the part of the Amazon located in Venezuela. Since the 1990s he has been producing paintings based on a local perspective, focusing on rescuing and preserving the cultural heritage, ancestral traditions and links to nature of the Yanomami. His father taught him to hunt and fish, and his mother taught him the ancestral world view of the Yanomami. He usually paints on hand-crafted paper made from local vegetable fibre using techniques that he learned at the start of his career in the 1990s from Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Together, they founded a collective called Yanomami Owëmamotina (‘the Yanomami art of paper-making’), which for more than a decade produced paper for use by the community in note-books, exercise books and cards. The collective also published a couple of books. In 2001 he decided to go it alone, and since then his explorations have led him to produce work intended to record, rescue and conserve the ways of life, links with the local environment, traditions and world-view of his native people. He does this through paintings that show schematic images of local flora and fauna, often inspired by the traditional body paint patterns and basket-work decoration of his community. His work can be seen as a sort of archive of the natural and supernatural worlds of the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco, and at the same time a revindication and an expression of concern for the survival of their extraordinary natural and cultural ecosystem in the context of a globalised economy. Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe's art, with its linear, schematic style that blends firmness and delicacy, gives examples of a relationship with the environment that are essential for the preservation of his own community and for the whole world.
At the same time, his oeuvre is a living archive and a personal, intimate interpretation of the traditions and identity of his native culture, its tales, its beliefs and its interaction with nature, stemming from a capacity for observation that has been all but lost. He thus succeeds in conveying a rich, sustainable legacy of values and customs, and in imagining ways of living that are beneficial for the health of the plant and could provide alternatives to the devastating effects of globalisation, which his own community is suffering.
In recent years he has taken part in the Berlin Biennale (2019) and the 12th Shanghai Biennial (2018). At the 2019 edition of ARCOmadrid he won the Illy SustainArt Prize. In 2021 he presented a series called Urihi Theri in his first solo exhibition in Europe, at the Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon. He has also taken part in the joint exhibitions 'Amazonia' at the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (CAAC) in Seville and 'Uma História Natural das Ruínas' at Pivô in São Paulo. In 2022 his work was displayed in 'ReVision: Art in the Americas' at the Denver Art Museum and the Kunsthalle in Vienna, at the 23rd Biennale of Sidney and at the 59th Venice Biennale with 'The Milk of Dreams', curated by Cecilia Alemani.
His work can also be found in the collections of the Lima Art Museum (MALI), the British Museum in London, the Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts (CONACULTA), the KADIST in San Francisco, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Columbia College in Chicago and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (CPPC) in New York, among others.