Kima (Emberá for “union/love”)

Kima (Emberá for “union/love”) is a project of photography, drawing and video installation between Karen Paulina Biswell, one of the most renowned young artists from Colombia, and María Amilbia Siagama Siagama, the eldest woman of a family of the indigenous Emberá community in the Colombian Andes.

Since 2010, Karen Paulina Biswell has been working with this family, retrieving their territory, and giving the community a voice through their own artistic practice of drawings celebrating nature’s offerings and representing the Emberá healing myths.

For the Emberá Chamí conversations are rituals and they have particularly elevated this practice into an art, notably through the celebration of corn. This healing ritual revolves around the chanting of the Jaibana (shaman) which connects human thought to the pluralism of nature. It embodies a sacred conversation, the beating heart of a collective body. During the ritual, the most pressing issues are discussed collectively: the return of armed paramilitary militias, forced displacement, ecology, but also questions of family and intimate life.

This exhibition tells a story which revisits the dominant narratives of the Conquest, ethnographic stories, memories of independence, through the Emberá rituals and a collective construction of image.

Wildpalms

Gerresheimer Straße 33
40211 Düsseldorf