WAYS OF REMEMBERING: YAHUARCANI AND MUÑOZ AT MASP

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) is currently hosting two exhibitions that address, through different artistic approaches, the relationships between memory, violence, and identity in Latin America.

Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge brings together 35 works by Peruvian artist, marking his first solo exhibition in Brazil. Curated by Amanda Carneiro, the show open until Agust 2nd immerses viewers in the cosmology of the Uitoto people, who inhabit the Amazon region between Colombia and Peru.

Organized into five sections—Painting Sounds, Time of Bloody Tears, Spiritual Worlds, Sacred Plants, and Guardians of the Amazon—the exhibition interweaves myths, knowledge systems, and historical trauma. Yahuarcani’s work combines hybrid figures and spiritual narratives with a strong denunciation of extractive violence, particularly during the Amazon rubber boom. His own family history is marked by this period, as his grandfather survived the Putumayo Genocide, which resulted in the death of around 30,000 Indigenous people.

Painted on llanchama—a vegetal surface made from Amazonian tree bark—the works emphasize a living relationship with the forest, understood not as a resource but as a spiritual entity and a repository of knowledge. In this worldview, humans, nature, and the invisible coexist without separation.

Alongside this exhibition, MASP presents Video Room: Oscar Muñoz until June 21, dedicated to Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz. Curated by Matheus de Andrade, the show features three video works that explore the fragility of memory and the instability of images in contexts shaped by political violence.

Using ephemeral materials such as water and charcoal, Muñoz creates images destined to vanish. In Narciso (2001), a floating face dissolves as water drains away; in Line of Destiny (2006), a reflection held in the palm of a hand distorts and disappears; and in Re/trato (2004), portraits painted with water on hot concrete evaporate before they can be completed.

These works resonate with a career deeply marked by the phenomenon of forced disappearance in Colombia, where images function both as traces and as absences. In Muñoz’s practice, memory is never fixed—it is a fragile, shifting process shaped by what endures and what fades.

Both exhibitions are part of MASP’s annual program dedicated to Latin American histories, offering a reflection on how art can shape collective memory, from ancestral narratives to contemporary urgencies.