Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge

In the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, where the renaco tree yields its precious bark and the forest whispers ancient stories, Santiago Yahuarcani has created a visual language that bridges millennia. This exhibition, presented in Manchester’s lovely Whitworth Art Gallery, spans works from 2005 to 2025 and presents the first survey of an artist whose work is as much about cultural survival as it is about visual richness.

Yahuarcani belongs to the Aimeni clan of the Uitoto Nation. He works on traditional bark cloth made from Amazonian trees, and uses pigments sourced directly from the forest floor. His paintings pulse with the rhythm of oral traditions passed down through generations, transformed by him into visual narratives. And many of the pictures are also completely bonkers. They teem with human figures and wildlife, sometimes terrifying and with the distinction between them often unclear. Spirits and rainbows and stars fly through the sky and the forest appears as a very sentient being.

The exhibition demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge systems offer alternative ways of understanding the natural world. But some of the paintings also address periods in the life of the Amazon where nature and indigenous populations have been decimated by extraction exploitation for products such as rubber. Yahuarcani’s painful memories of colonial violence, dispossession and environmental destruction are rendered with the same passion as his celebration of family life and forest sounds.

Organised into themes, the exhibition allows us to trace the evolution of Yahuarcani’s work while understanding the consistent threads that run through it. From his early tourist paintings to his mature explorations of Uitoto mythology, to his paintings which show the impact of COVID-19 on his community, we witness an artist discovering that his great power lies in mining his own cultural inheritance and finding that the themes unearthed have global resonance.

There is some success in transposing the multisensory nature of Yahuarcani’s work with supporting videos and detailed explanations and quotes. The exhibition demonstrates the contemporary relevance of traditional voices and materials used to carry modern messages about environmental protection and cultural rights. Yahuarcani’s work offers a powerful reminder that the beginning of knowledge (to take the exhibition’s title) often lies in remembering what we have always known. The result is art that is both deeply rooted and but wholly relevant to issues of the current and desperate need for social and environmental justice. 

Until 4 January 2026 at The Whitworth, Manchester