Claudia Andujar‘Genocídio do Yanomami’

‘Genocídio do Yanomami’ (Yanomami Genocide) brings together previously unpublished photographs made between 1971 and 1989 by artist Claudia Andujar. The photographs were made among the Indigenous Yanomami people who live in the remote forest of the Orinoco River basin in southern Venezuela and the northernmost reaches of the Amazon River basin in northern Brazil.

Andujar’s work ‘Yanomami Genocide: Death of Brazil’ was first presented in April 1989 at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) as an installation with colour slides projected onto plastic screens and mirrors. The photographs were originally black and white, and the artist’s re-illumination of the images reshaped their meaning, instilling urgency for that moment and the years that followed. Andujar’s aim was to raise awareness of the situation faced by the Yanomami, who at the time suffered from disease brought to their land by illegal gold miners. In this new book, Andujar has again recontextualised the images, bringing them into the present and reshaping their meaning for dissemination to a contemporary audience, as the Yanomami remain in peril.

The photographs in the book show both the Yanomami and the landscape they inhabit. They were created with a variety of experimental techniques to visually represent the shamanic culture. They are often high contrast with dramatic light and shadow, distorted, cropped, imbued with a sense of movement, menace, and the otherworldly. The images of people focus on fragments of bodies or close-cropped portraits, hinting at intimacy and the psychological.

Silkscreen hardcover with French folds, 18 x 27,3 cm, Oblong size, colors photographs. Limited edt of 750 copies.