Peru

Sara Flores challenges the viewer to perceive the world differently. The vibrational power of the intricate networks she paints on raw cotton canvases elevates the practices of kené to unprecedented heights. Kené is a highly complex ancestral visual language distinctive to the artist’s people, the Shipibo-Konibo of the Peruvian Amazon. From Other Worlds presents Sara Flores’ works as portals between ancestral knowledge and sustainable futures — works that harmoniously interconnect the human and non-human realms, granting access to the multiverse of the Shipibo worldview. Imagination as a form of radical resistance requires deep listening.

Through a life of activism and commitment to collective and environmental causes, the artist makes explicit a vision of kené in its political dimension. Not only does she create hypnotic beauty; she also transforms her designs into a flag for the Shipibo Nation, proposing a feminine and relational approach to territorial sovereignty that stands in radical contrast to the emblems of conquest, articulating a message of eco-dependency that is both simple and profoundly urgent for the world as a whole: We are all interconnected.