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

Her selection to represent Peru marks a landmark moment for Indigenous representation in Venice.

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.

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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,........

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