Presenting the river as a living, interconnected being, Listening to the Voices of the Rivers draws on Indigenous ontologies and oral traditions to fashion a visual narrative in which healing, knowledge and ecology flow through water. The show features eleven Indigenous artists from across Peru and Brazil, including Denilson Baniwa, Lilly Baniwa, Gustavo Caboco, Danna Gaviota, Kimber Fercat, Pedro Alca, Brus Rubio Churay, Tayná Sateré and Rember Yahuarcani. The show also features artists, Cordelia Sánchez / Pesin Kate and Harry Pinedo / Inin Metsa who are referred to here including their indigenous names.
They are joined by UK based artist duo, Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich who engaged with local schools to co-create work responding to the Lort Burn, a hidden river in Newcastle. The exhibition was curated by Dr Giuliana Borea, Dr Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Dr Harriet Sutcliffe, and incorporates a series of talks and workshops encouraging cross-disciplinary discussion. The project is a collaboration between Newcastle Contemporary Art, Newcastle University, University of London’s School of Advanced Study, and the Amazonart Project.
Drawing on ancient healing practices, Listening to the Voices of the Rivers invites viewers into Amazonian cosmologies in which the river carries knowledge and healing powers. Central to this worldview are kene designs – geometric, interlocking patterns traditionally woven and embroidered on garments and ceremonial textiles. Kene designs are passed down generationally through Shipibo-Conibo women from the Ucayali River in Peru.
Cordelia Sánchez/Pesin Kate’s painting, The Woman and the River (La mujer y el río) (2025) foregrounds Shipibo women’s daily lives along the river. At its centre, a woman washes a kene embroidered cloth, dressed in a yellow top and white skirt, disproportionately sized to emphasise her significance. Surrounding her, female figures bathe, carry water, feed chickens, and care for children amid lush greenery. Above the treeline, kene patterns stretch across the sky in luminous green chains, accented with blue, purple and neon orange, connecting everyday practices to ancestral traditions.
On the opposite wall, Harry Pinedo/ Inin Metsa’s painting, Under the Protection of Water (Bajo la protección del agua), 2025, depicts an underwater world where vivid turquoise waters envelop a shaman figure encircled by a large anaconda snake. Butterflies, pink dolphins, mermaids, trailing plants, turtles and fish animate the surrounding scene.
In Shipibo cosmology, each person carries a unique kené design within their body. Illness occurs when this design becomes knotted or tangled. Pinedo’s painting depicts the Shipibo-Conibo shaman ingesting ayahuasca to spiritually journey into the river and communicate with the great anaconda (Ronin) which is considered to be the protector of the river and mother of creativity. Through icaros – medicine songs – the shaman ‘sings’ the form of the kené, untangling the patient’s internal pattern. Here, the material and immaterial significance of kené emerges through a synesthetic relationship between seeing, singing and healing, forming a bridge between spirit, body, design and ecology.
The second section of the exhibition examines activism responding to the destruction of the Amazon, with artists addressing mercury pollution, historic rubber exploitation, oil and gas extraction, and migration.
Denilson Baniwa’s series ‘Hydrargyrum 80 – What Do You Eat?’ (2023) features four large photographic prints of Amazonian fish in vivid yellow, red, green, and blue, overlaid with white traditional Baniwa motifs forming skeletal symbols. The series focuses on the violent impacts of mercury contamination in the Amazon’s ecosystem.
The artist incorporates small, evenly spaced Ben Day Dots – to generate tonal variation while evoking mass-printed imagery. Combining the Pop Art aesthetics with traditional Baniwa symbols encourages a subversive reinterpretation of colonial classification and archiving.
Baniwa’s series features the text ‘Que Comes? Veneno!’ (‘What do you eat? Poison!’) emphasising the toxicity of mercury. A 2020 study, Mercury in Fish Marketed in the Amazon Triple Frontier and Health Risk Assessment, found fish central to Indigenous diets in Brazil – Tucunaré, Traíra, Surubim, and Piranha – to consistently surpass the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) safety threshold of mercury in fish, with Tucunaré reaching 4.549 mg/g, approximately nine times the recommended limit. Mercury contamination is a direct consequence of illegal gold mining and elevated mercury levels have been linked to cognitive impairment, vision loss, cancer, intestinal disorders, miscarriages, and birth abnormalities within affected communities.
The final part of the exhibition advocates for new ways of living with water, emphasising relationality and coexistence through living memory and youth engagement.
Gustavo Caboco and Roseane Cadete’s short film ‘We Are Living Borders’ (2022) recalls the 1790 Bloody Beach Revolt, when Indigenous people on the Branco River in North Brazil were massacred whilst resisting Portuguese military colonisers. Under an open structure in the forest, a group of young students lift a long red cloth above their heads, walking in a large circle and engaging playfully with the camera. The scene changes and the screen splits, showing two different shots of the same landscape. The foreground shows marshland, a large tree in the background. A striking red line of fabric cuts horizontally across both frames, disjointedly meeting in the middle of the screen. A different man comes in and out of each frame: one holds the cloth above his head, as if carrying water, the other follows the cloth along a fallen tree. The screen then returns to a single image. Both figures are tightly wrapped in red, stretching the colour across the frame. One man attempts to walk, and then they both begin to hop together, their movements constricted by the binding fabric.
Filmed in collaboration with students from Canauanim Indigenous Land, ‘We Are Living Borders’ aims to engage younger audiences in activism and conservation. By engaging the landscape, the land becomes a witness, absorbing and holding memory, forming a vehicle for ancestral connection. The continuous red fabric stretches across different scenes, and the film unfolds as a slow, captivating dance, exploring the intergenerational trauma of colonial violence.
Neil Bromwich and Zoe Walker have created a floating river installation ‘Conjuring a River’ (2025), suspended above the viewer and supported by slender branches. The work references Newcastle’s ‘ghost river’, the Lort Burn, a hidden river running beneath the city. Positioned in the centre of the second room, long rolls of white paper, held aloft by tall branches, evoke the river’s quiet, concealed presence.
The Lort Burn once flowed from Castle Leazes to the River Tyne. High Bridge Works, now home to NCA, marks the site of the former Upper Dean Bridge, a historic bridge once connecting Pilgrim Street with the Bigg Market. In 1784, the river was filled in and built over after it had become unsanitary. During recent renovations of the gallery, contractors discovered two medieval wells beneath the site.
The flowing lines and suspended form within the installation echo the embodied gestures of ‘We Are Living Borders’, creating a dialogue through movement, material, and memory. Together, the works reveal how buried histories resurface, shaping both physical spaces and inherited landscapes.
The final part of the exhibition includes a poem by Indigenous writer and activist, Ailton Krenak,
“Respect the water and learn its language. Let us listen to the voices of the rivers, for they speak. Let us be like water in matter and spirit, in our movement and capacity to change courses, or we will be lost”.
The exhibition Listening to the Voices of the River opens a portal into the Amazon’s living cosmologies, where river, memory and myth converge. As curator Dr Giuliana Borea noted during an exhibition tour, rivers are often perceived as immortal, a presumption that heightens their vulnerability. By foregrounding personal and collective relationships with water, rivers are presented as complex, interconnected beings that both require and facilitate caregiving, inviting viewers to experience water as relational rather than inexhaustible. The work reflects the severity and complexity of ecological and cultural challenges faced by Amazonian waterside communities, while celebrating Indigenous knowledge and ancestral practices as vital modes of connection and learning.
Listening to the Voices of the Rivers ran from 30th October – 22nd November, 2025.
Anna Mud is an artist and researcher based in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
This interview was supported by Newcastle Contemporary Art.
Published 04.02.2026 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
1,427 words
