Wild visions of nature and carnage fuelled by hallucinogens: Santiago Yahuarcani review

The Whitworth, Manchester
The Peruvian artist paints hybrid creatures, rocks with eyes and fish brandishing spears in a shamanistic celebration of his home and his people – but also the terrifying colonial horrors inflicted upon them

Santiago Yahuarcani is the leader of the White Heron clan of the Uitoto Nation, an Indigenous population of the Amazon basin in Peru and Colombia. He uses his work to preserve the history of his people, confront the violence they have had to endure, and fight for a future that is relentlessly under threat. In his paintings, celestial beings dance in starlight. Hybrid creatures – part-human, part-dolphin – wade through rivers. Bodies meld with nature and jungle melds with body. These dizzyingly shamanistic paintings of mythological creatures and Indigenous spiritualism are a celebration of his home, his people and his past.

The show – part of the Manchester International festival – opens with three vast, chaotic paintings on traditional bark canvas, a rough, dense material that he painstakingly hammers flat with a machete. Each work is filled with a whorl of licking tongues, gawping mouths and endless hybrid creatures. A woman with webbed fingers and scales down her back gathers fish in her arms as a man inhales big clouds of smoke being puffed out by a grey figure with crab claws for hands. Rocks have eyes and teeth, birds become lizards, fish brandish spears. If it sounds like it’s fuelled by hallucinogens, that’s because it is: medicinal plants like ayahuasca, as well as coca and tobacco, are an integral part of Uitoto culture.

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