Ana Mas Projects | ABRA Caracas

Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Sheroana, Venezuela, 1971), indigenous artist residing in Platanal, a Yanomami community in the Upper Orinoco near Mahekoto-Teri, who since the nineties has been developing a work aimed at recovering the oral memory of his people, of its cosmogony and ancestral traditions. Hakihiiwe uses the elaboration of craft paper, the edition of books elaborated together with his community, and more recently drawing as a tool to represent the most diverse aspects of Yanomami life. Hakihiiwe develops through drawing a synthetic, concrete and minimal language on the vast and intense relationship of its community with the landscape that surrounds it. These links permeate the realm of the personal and the collective, his work being a contemporary revision of the cosmogony and the Yanomami imaginary.His art evokes the archive of a preserved memory and promotes, at the same time, an aesthetic response in which time and space are subjective aspects. His works are conceived as the expression of knowledge and as the foundation that unites the ancestral with the contemporary in a fragmented time in which past and present coexist, consciously and unconsciously, in a heterochronic impulse that inhabits two or more universes. Today, -from the center of the debate on the contemporary in art-, these representations claim their visibility in the broad and complex artistic circuit, no longer as a strategy of alterity, as a theme or content at the margin or the center of, but thought and accepted as an alternative canon to cultural hegemony.

In recent years Hakihiiwe has participated in the Berlin Biennale (2019) and the XII Shanghai Biennale (2018); in the 2019 edition of ARCOmadrid, he was awarded the illy SustainArt Award. Recently, he has presented ‘Urihi their’, his first solo exhibition in Europe at Kunsthalle Lissabon; he has been part of the group exhibitions ‚ReVisión: Art in the Americas’ at Denver Art Museum, ‚And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?’ at Kunsthalle Wien in Austria, ‘Amazonia’, curated by Berta Sichel, at CAAC (Andalusian Art Center in Seville) and ‘Uma História Natural das Ruinas’ (A Natural History of Ruins) in Pivo Sao Paulo, curated by Catalina Lozano. In 2022 he will participate in the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 in Nepal, curated by Cosmin Costinas, Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung; in the Sydney Biennial curated by José Roca; and in the Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams’, curated by Cecilia Alemani. His work is part of important collections such as the Denver Art Museum, the Lima Art Museum, the British Museum in London, the Conaculta Collection in Mexico, the Kadist Collection in San Francisco (USA), the Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires (Argentina), the Columbia College of Art in Chicago, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection in New York or the Banco de España Collection, among others.

Ana Mas Projects is a contemporary art gallery born in 2015 and based in Barcelona, in a 70’s industrial building in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. It also runs a parallel programming in San Juan (Puerto Rico) since that date. The gallery now represents a multi-generational roaster of 15 artists, Spanish based and international, of which two thirds are women. Their practice explores a wide range of media that reflect the diversity of formal and conceptual discourses and narratives that define our time, supporting their vision in a dialogue with critics and curators, institutions and collectors, to boost the research and development of their body of work. AMP is the result of the accumulated experience from two previous projects, masART gallery (2004-2012) and Maserre gallery (2013-2015). || ABRA is a gallery dedicated to contemporary art, founded in January 2016 by Melina Fernández Temes and Luis Romero. Based in the Centro de Arte Los Galpones, a cultural complex in the city of Caracas/Venezuela. ABRA has defined itself since its beginnings as a multidisciplinary and open space, where the interested public can meet and dialogue in the framework of recurring events dedicated to various creative forms of expression. ABRA’s programme includes both the dissemination of the work of medium and long-established artists, as well as the visibility of proposals by emerging Venezuelan artists. The gallery also runs the ArchivoAbierto project, dedicated to the revision and evaluation of the visual arts in the country. To date, ABRA’s spaces have hosted more than sixty individual and group exhibitions, as well as regular events such as guided tours, talks, performances, poetry recitals, contemporary dance presentations, concerts and training workshops.