ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
BOOTH P8

"Sell painting, buy land - a movement of resistance to regain territory in the Amazon rainforest."

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Positions sector, Carmo Johnson Projects gallery presents MAHKU - Huni Kuin Artists Movement (Acre - Amazon - Brazil). Showcasing a solid body of paintings, related to their Huni Kuin ancestry, the artworks translate and transform the Huni Meka Chants, the ceremony in which ayahuasca medicine is consecrated, into images. These songs, in turn, are paths that place participants in ayahuasca (nixi pae) rituals in relation to otherness. The MAHKU therefore paints a relationship of technology, paintings that are bridges towards the non-indigenous world.

Founded in 2012, MAHKU’s work is centered around the juxtaposition of elements of their surrounding environment through disjointed narratives, catalyzing an unique experience through vivid colors and their own, almost surrealistic, interpretation of the Amazon forest.

Led by Ibã Huni Kuin, MAHKU’s painting is a political, social and aesthetic tool that the collective uses to recover lost lands, guarantee basic rights and perpetuate the oral and visual Huni Kuin tradition. Their latter’s most notable achievement was through the Vende tela, compra terra (Sell painting, buy land) initiative, pursuing territorial restitution.

Through the purchase of more than 20 hectares of land in their own habitat region and aims at gaining autonomy in their own territory. They are getting organized to have the MAHKU Institute opened, with the intention of creating an independent center for research and preservation of the forest as well as their Huni Kuin knowledge and traditions.

Although MAHKU’s artists paint separately, they are strongly connected amongst family relations, coming across three generations. Grandfather, father and son, evading a common reign of logic. Thus, the wealth of MAHKU’s work lies in an instinctive embodiment of the mind’s own irrationality and desires, all while amplified through individual stylistic traits and interpretations of the visible and invisible worlds.

This scenario reveals MAHKU’s paramount role within the contemporary indigenous art scene, both nationally and internationally. Its social, political, and aesthetic position through sell painting, to buy land, immortalizes the Amazon rainforest’s ancestral knowledge, recovers land lost during the late 19th century’s Amazon rubber cycle and reaffirms the social importance of reparation and attention to the Brazilian indigenous peoples.

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