A New Exhibition at the Shed Explores a Return From the Edge of Extinction

When photographer Claudia Andujar first arrived in Yanomami territory in northern Brazil in the early 1970s, she intended to take photographs of the indigenous Yanomami people for a new politically minded Brazilian magazine, Realidade. But ultimately the images she made—many of which make up the mournful, hopeful, deeply moving exhibition The Yanomami Struggle, currently underway at The Shed in New York— only constitute a fragment of her legacy for the Yanomami. Even as she embedded with and documented the lives and traditions of the Yanomami people, the now-91-year-old Andujar, taught them to defend themselves from threats both immediate—the increasing outside encroachments that had begun with the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1964—and existential. The discovery of valuable minerals like gold, uranium, and cassiterite in the Yanomami territory in the 1970’s brought prospectors and miners and other undesirable outside attention—and with it, disease, pollution, exploitation, deforestation. For many indigenous people across Brazil it meant total annihilation. A WWII refugee who fled Hungary as a child and whose entire patriarchal family was murdered at Auschwitz and Dachau, Andujar had experience with annihilation. She was not, she explained through an interpreter at a press conference this week, content to sit back and watch history repeat itself.

The photographs that Andujar took of the Yanomami in 1971, and those that she has taken in the half-century since, along with various works on paper and film by Yanomami artists, are part of a traveling exhibition co-organized with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the Moreira Salles institute in Sao Paulo. It is an exceptional exhibition, with work that is staggering in its volume (there are over 200 works by Andujar and around 80 by Yanomami artists), and the scope and depth of its intimacy. 

There are images of births and deaths, hunting and gathering, projects and play, ruminative portraits of bellies and nipples and lips and eyes, communal huts lit ceremonially aflame, of shamanic rituals and the accordant visions. Some are straight reportage style, some capture their more mystical and cosmological themes (Andujar calls these “the spirit of the forest”) using photographic techniques like multiple exposures and infrared film. The works on view are deeply resonant: It is impossible to see these images of and by the Yanomami and not become aware of how precarious their lives are, how threatened every aspect of their existence has become due to the craven principles of economic progress at all (environmental) costs. The Yanomami, and indigenous people like them, are the front line of the question of how viable the future will be on this planet. Or as Fondation Cartier’s artistic managing director Hervé Chandes told Vogue, “We are at a tipping point. After the Yanomami, it’s all of us.” 

Andujar’s experience of surviving the Holocaust is what built trust with and reverence for the photojournalist, shaman and leader Davi Kopenawa says. Andujar wasn’t just exceptionally creative with a camera; she was a survivor, one who knew what it was like to be up against an enemy who rejects your very right to exist. She knew the importance of telling the story on a human level. Her photographs were so effective at stoking empathy and rallying support for the Yanomami in the late’70s that she was briefly expelled from the region by the government, leading her and fellow activists Bruce Albert and Carlos Zacquini to create the the Pro-Yanomami Commission (or CCPY). This nonprofit led the fight for the protection of Yanomami land and encouraged initiatives like vaccination programs to protect the Yanomami against fatal infectious diseases like tuberculosis, measles, and most recently, the COVID-19 epidemic. (One of the exhibition’s more moving sections includes Andujar’s “identification portraits” from the 1980s, a kind of  vaccine card for a people who can use multiple names and do not rely on formal documents, but which here call to mind Andujar’s familial trauma, namely the marking of the Jews during the Holocaust.) Spurred on by the CCPY, a presidential decree demarcated the Yanomami territory in 1992, though the new borders didn’t stop illegal gold miners from murdering 16 Yanomami people a year later, a horror which is evocatively referenced in Andujar’s short film The Yanomami Genocide: The Death of Brazil, which plays on loop in a somber semi-circular theater at The Shed. The titular struggle, this show emphasizes, is very much not over. 

“[Andujar] is not Yanomami, but she is a true friend,” Kopenawa said in remarks that have been since memorialized on one of the exhibition walls: “She taught me to fight, to defend our people, land, language, customs, festivals, dances, chants, and shamanism. She explained things to me like my own mother would. I did not know how to fight against politicians, against the non-Indigenous people. It was good that she gave me the bow and arrow as a weapon, not for killing whites but for speaking in defense of the Yanomami people.” This exhibition, Kopenawa told Vogue, is another sheaf of arrows in his quiver: The hope is that visitors will come, educate themselves, and demand change. 

The election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a reason for cautious optimism: Lula began his presidency by revoking all of Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous and anti-environment measures, and created the country’s first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, headed up by Sônia Guajajara, of the Guajajara/Tentehar people, a staunch defender of the Amazon. But it’s unclear whether these measures are enough in the face of the ruin and devastation that have already occurred, and whether they will actually be enforced without global attention and the pressure it brings. “It’s a war. It’s a war,” Chandes said. “It’s the Amazon, it’s the air we breathe. And it’s the beauty of the world, too, by the way.” Yes, Kopenawa agreed: “It’s worth fighting for.” Maybe the people who come to see this show will want to fight for it too.

The Yanomami Struggle is produced by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the Moreira Salles institute in Sao Paulo, and in partnership with the Brazilian N.G.Os Hutukara Associacao Yanomani and Instituto Socioambiental, and is at The Shed from February 3–April 16, 2023.