As a child, artist Sara Flores learned Kené—a sacred geometric design system of the Shipibo-Konibo of the Amazon—at her mother’s side. Her mother learned in much the same way. The art form, passed through matrilineal lines linking back to an ancient ancestral past, expresses an accumulated knowledge of medicine, cosmology, ethics, and community care.
These compositions, entrancing in their detailed repetition, are now earning Kené a new international audience. Flores is currently representing Peru at the 2026 Venice Biennale, making her the first Indigenous artist to do so. This week, she will open “Akinananti,” her new solo exhibition at White Cube in New York, which will run from June 26th to August 14th.
Untitled (Panshin Pei Maya Kené, 2026), 2026
Sara Flores
White Cube
“The practice is not passed down through teaching in a formal sense, but through presence, through living it together,” said Flores, during a recent interview. Flores creates her works alongside her daughters and granddaughters, continuing the collective knowledge of Shipibo-Konibo women.
“The lines we paint connect us within a matriarchy that begins in ancestral time and will never stop. My work does not begin with me, and it will not end with me,” she explained.
Born in Peru in 1950, where she still lives, Flores is one of the foremost artists working in Kené today. She belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo nation—also known as Shipibo-Conibo—an Indigenous people residing along the Ucayali River. In keeping with the Kené tradition, she paints precise, interlocking geometric designs on cotton using dyes made from bark, river clay, turmeric, achiote, and other materials gathered from her surrounding environment.
Akinananti, in the Shipibo language, describes communal work done in a spirit of love and joy. Flores, who was born in the small village of Tambo Mayo and grew up in the community of Pahoyan along the Ucayali River, comes from a history of shared labor and resources centered on the river.
“We are river people,” she said. “The water, the forest, the plants, the animals—everything around us was alive and in relation to everything else. That is not a metaphor. That is simply how life was organized.”
This way of life was born of reciprocity. “We ate sitting together in a circle on the ground. We worked together. The community and the territory were not separate things,” she said.
Untitled (Punté Kené, 2026), 2026
Sara Flores
White Cube
“Akinananti” brings together both new and historical works by the artist. The centerpiece of the show, Untitled (A Window onto Endlessness) 2 (2025), is regarded by Flores as a sister work to a painting currently on view in her presentation “From Other Worlds” at Peru’s pavilion. This colossal painting is the largest work Flores has ever made, measuring over 8 feet tall and almost 15 and a half feet wide. Repeating patterns form a hypnotic, lattice-like network that hints at the interconnectedness of all life forms.
The new attention Flores has brought to Kené comes at a critical moment for the Shipibo-Konibo. Ecological devastation and encroaching industry, including illegal logging, have pushed the ecosystem into a calamitous state.
These realities are at the heart of Flores’s practice, and she understands her work as a form of Indigenous resistance. “Our home along the Ucayali River is under unprecedented pressure from logging, mining, and monocultures. Palm oil and coca, in particular,” she shared. “The forest we depend upon for our materials, our medicine, our knowledge, is being destroyed. I see myself with the responsibility of using the platforms given to me to speak up on behalf of my people.”
The patterns in Flores’s work come from those found in nature, such as the skin of the native carachama fish, the structure of leaves, or the movement of water. “These patterns are also inside ourselves, like the network of our minds,” she said. “Kené does not represent nature from the outside. It is an expression of the same logic that organizes it.”
“Akinananti” is organized in collaboration with the Shipibo-Conibo Center in New York, a nonprofit organization that works alongside Indigenous leadership in the Amazon toward Shipibo self-determination, territorial sovereignty, and a sustainable future.
Through this collaboration, proceeds from the sale of Flores’s work go directly to support Indigenous resistance in the Peruvian Amazon through programs supporting legal defense of the territory, as well as youth programs fostering ancestral knowledge of plants, art, and territorial resistance.
“The work of art and the work of environmental activism and the struggle for self-determination cannot be separated,” Flores said. “That is something I feel deeply.”
