Sara Flores Brings Kené to New York as Peru’s Venice Biennale Spotlight Grows
A major moment for Shipibo-Konibo art is unfolding on two continents at once. Peruvian artist Sara Flores (b. 1950) is representing Peru at the 2026 Venice Biennale, where she has become the first Indigenous artist to do so, and this week she opens “Akinananti” at White Cube in New York, on view from June 26 to August 14.
Flores’s rise has drawn new attention to Kené, the sacred geometric design system she learned as a child from her mother. The practice, passed through matrilineal lines among the Shipibo-Konibo of the Amazon, carries knowledge that extends far beyond pattern: medicine, cosmology, ethics, and communal care. Flores still lives in Peru and continues to make her work with her daughters and granddaughters, preserving a form of knowledge that is lived rather than formally taught.
In her paintings, precise interlocking forms unfold across cotton surfaces in dyes made from bark, river clay, turmeric, achiote, and other materials gathered from the surrounding environment. The effect is both disciplined and immersive. Repetition becomes structure, and structure becomes a way of thinking about relation — between people, plants, animals, and territory.
“Akinananti,” a Shipibo word for communal work carried out in a spirit of love and joy, brings together new and historical works. Its centerpiece, “Untitled (A Window onto Endlessness) 2” (2025), is described by Flores as a sister work to a painting now included in her presentation “From Other Worlds” at Peru’s pavilion. At more than 8 feet tall and nearly 15.5 feet wide, it is the largest work she has made, and its lattice-like pattern suggests an expansive, interconnected field rather than a single image.
The exhibition arrives at a difficult moment for the Shipibo-Konibo, whose territory along the Ucayali River faces pressure from illegal logging, mining, monocultures, palm oil, and coca. Flores has said she sees her work as a form of Indigenous resistance, using the visibility of major platforms to speak for her community. Proceeds from sales of her work support legal defense of territory and youth programs in the Peruvian Amazon.
That combination of formal rigor, inherited knowledge, and political urgency helps explain why Flores’s work is resonating now. Kené is not being presented as a relic of the past, but as a living visual language — one that insists on continuity, reciprocity, and the right to remain rooted in place.
