Sara Flores On Bringing Shipibo-Konibo Cosmology to Peru’s Venice Pavilion

As Indigenous cultures come to be recognized not merely as ethnographic products but as holders of living heritage and systems of knowledge—and increasingly appreciated in their contemporary expressions—Indigenous artists have become a recurring presence at major biennales. Yet, among national pavilions in Venice, very few Indigenous artists have represented their countries. Jeffrey Gibson taking over the U.S. Pavilion in 2024 marked a first, as did the Scandinavian Pavilion becoming the Sámi Pavilion in 2022, the first time Indigenous artists represented the Nordic countries collectively in Venice.

In this Biennale, Peru will also mark a first, acknowledging the role of the still-vibrant cultures of its Indigenous communities. Following her inclusion in a past Venice Biennale, Sara Flores will represent Peru, taking over the National Pavilion in a significant moment of recognition for the entire Shipibo-Konibo community she belongs to. In just a few years, she has gained international recognition and fully entered the global circuit, represented by major galleries such as White Cube and collaborating with Dior. In recent months, leading New York institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, have acquired her work, joining other major museums that had already added her work to their collections, among them Tate, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco.

Flores’s artistic practice is, first of all, a ritual to reattune with a broader universal order. Channeling the ancient wisdom and spirituality of her community into her canvases, her labyrinthine grids and entanglements of lines chart the vital intertwining of all beings—an entanglement of energies, matter and forces that connect human life to the cosmos, linking the micro and the macro, the earthly and the celestial. As the title of the pavilion suggests, these intricate patterns seem to originate from “other worlds,” which Flores channels into our terrestrial, time-bound dimension. This process involves entering an altered state of consciousness attuned to nature and to broader cosmic forces—the continuous flow of energy and matter from which all things emerge and on which they depend.

“I do think of myself as a channel, a medium. I am part of a process,” Flores says, speaking with Observer ahead of the opening of the Venice Biennale. The designs come through vision, dreams, her relationship with plants and the knowledge passed down to her, she explains. “My role is to receive, to understand, and to bring that into form with care and precision.”

Flores follows a tradition passed down for centuries by the Shipibo-Konibo people, and her work brings this heritage into the contemporary realm. There is both a sense of responsibility and a political act in this, as she operates both as a contemporary artist and a custodian of her community and its living heritage. The specific design she works with is called kené; it’s both a language and a force. “When the work is finished, it has its own presence, in a way that often surprises me as well, lines move, they vibrate, they can shift your perception,” she notes. Many people feel drawn into the work, almost as if entering another space. In that sense, Flores acknowledges, they can be understood as portals—not because they contain a fixed meaning, but because they open a way of seeing. “We, the Shipibo, believe that illness is caused by disordered designs, and that healing consists in unraveling them and replacing them with orderly patterns,” she explains, noting how kené is also a form of medicine, facilitating a process of collective healing. As a network, kené connects different forms of life, bringing together the human and the non-human, the visible and the invisible, in a single plane of existence. “It reflects a way of understanding the world in which everything is interconnected, like a system of reciprocity,” Flores states.

Her kené designs can also be read as a visual manifesto of her commitment to the core values of Shipibo ethics and to protocols of conviviality, reciprocity and kinship that extend beyond humans to animals, plants, land and water. Her art is in this way politically charged, standing as an emblem of artistic activism. The healing power of her patterns extends to both human and natural dimensions, calling for universal solidarity and sustainability.

At the same time, Flores has continuously pushed these ancestral design systems into new territories, engaging in an ongoing process of experimentation and transformation. For her, the term “tradition” can be misleading, because kené is not something fixed. It is a living language—forward-looking, with an innate urge for continuous reinvention. “Kené has elements, like a vocabulary. You can combine them, transform them and also create new ones,” she explains. “My work is to recombine these elements and to invent new ones. I never repeat the same pattern twice. Each design is unique. In this way, the practice becomes a movement toward the infinite.” The most important work is always the one still to come.

There are two aspects to these works. The menín is the technical part—the discipline, the precision, the ability to execute the design correctly, with no stains—and it improves with discipline, sacrifice and long practice sessions. Then comes the shinán: the visionary part, the imagination, the energy that comes through dreams and through the relationship with the plants. That is what gives the work its awe. It precedes everything else. So even if the language is ancestral, it is never static. “It continues to grow, like a plant. It responds to the energy of life growing, to the person who is painting, to what is being lived and felt,” Flores says. “For me, to push kené into new territories is about affirming Indigenous identities for the future.”

“In the time of our ancestors, those who lived downriver drew straight designs, or punté kené. The people upriver drew curvilinear designs instead, or maya kené—that is, the line that advances by turning and turning,” she explains. “We have learned kené from different sources. This is the history of our families, shaped by the union of Shipibo and Konibo. This is our contemporary art history.”

This approach also clearly resists any notion of individual authorship or singular artistic identity that anchors much of Western art history. Instead, Flores’s work emerges from and remains connected to collective knowledge and community. “For me, art is not separate from life. Kené is part of our way of existing and of relating to the world.” Kené is also a way to maintain and transmit knowledge. “My daughters, my granddaughters, and I spend the whole day, every day, painting, talking, laughing, crying,” she shares. “The lines we paint connect us within a matriarchy that begins in ancestral time and will never stop; it will continue to exist forever.” Painting together creates and reinforces a vital matriarchal continuum; the lines of kené connect each individual to previous generations and to the community as one. For Flores, her work does not begin with her, and it will not end with her.

At the same time, each work is made by one person within that shared process. In the past, every woman received training in this art. Yet today, it is becoming rarer to find a family of artists as committed as hers. “We continue to work with a level of quality, love and sacrifice that is no longer common. For this reason, it is also important to recognize individual authorship and the effort toward excellence,” she says, noting that she hopes this can inspire others to follow the same path. “We are here to honor those who painted before us, and at the same time to open a path for the generations to come.”

When these works enter the space of contemporary art, Flores argues, they do not change their nature: they continue to carry that knowledge. But they can create an encounter. “They invite people to slow down, to look, to feel, and to reconnect with something that may have been forgotten,” she says. “I have seen how people respond. They place the work in the spaces where they live, where they sleep, and they tell me it brings calm, balance, a sense of well-being.”

Flores shares how she has also witnessed more intense experiences. She will never forget what happened to the American artist and poet Julie Ezelle-Patton the first time she entered her show. “She began to cry and laugh at the same time, channeling very strong emotions, and I believe she started having powerful visions of her own. These moments remind her that the work continues beyond her.

Flores wants people to understand that kené is not something she has “reclaimed,” because it was never lost. “It has always been alive within our people, and it will keep being reinvented forever, carried by women, transmitted through generations and present in our daily life, in our bodies, in our relationship with the forest.” What has been absent, she adds, is recognition of its value outside these communities—especially within Peru, where the Indigenous experience remains marked by discrimination, cultural appropriation and violations of rights.

Flores considers her work to begin from a place of cultural continuity: “I paint as I was taught, following a knowledge that comes from my mother and my grandmother and that, according to our myths, was revealed in ancient times, when the connection between humans, animals and nature was more direct, from the cosmic anaconda Ronín, whose skin contains all possible designs. Kené is a form of visual medicine. It is a way of restoring balance.”

Bringing this practice into a space like the Venice Biennale is not about adapting it to the contemporary world, but about allowing it to exist and have an impact beyond its immediate context. “I do not see myself as just representing my people, but as part of a collective process that is much larger than me,” she says.

Flores nonetheless acknowledges her responsibility. “My work makes visible a knowledge that has often been ignored or marginalized within Peru. I’m the first Indigenous artist ever appointed to represent our country in Venice. I obviously welcome this act of inclusion,” she clarifies. Yet for her, being featured in a national pavilion does not erase the long history of exclusion. “It is an act of poetic justice, and hopefully it will open the path for many other women who look like me to follow.”

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