SARA FLORES: AKINANANTI
White Cube New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Shipibo-Konibo artist Sara Flores (b. 1950, Tambomayo, Peru).
June 25 – August 14, 2026
Flores is recognised locally and internationally for her masterful Kené, an ancient medium that is central to the artistic expression and cultural heritage of the Shipibo-Konibo people.
Created with materials sourced from the Amazon, including bark, leaves, berries and wild cotton, her works are produced with her daughters, as part of a tradition passed down matriarchally through generations. In the Shipibo language, ‘Akinananti’ describes work done together with love and joy – a practice and lifeway rooted in reciprocity, interconnectedness and mutual aid, where individual well-being is inseparable from collective and environmental balance, for the flourishing of life and community.
Flores’s own experience parallels this change. Although she still lives on the Ucayali, she is now represented by White Cube, among the most cutting edge of international contemporary galleries. This year, Sara Flores is the featured artist in the Peruvian Pavilion at that bellwether of contemporaneity, the 61st Venice Biennale.
Fifty years after Josef’s death, the world has finally caught up with the Albers. For them, the either/or question – ethnography or art – was always artificial. So, too, that of history versus contemporaneity. There were underlying values – ‘truthfulness to conception and material, truthfulness to art as spiritual creation’ – that defied place and time. To question whether the anonymous Mexican makers whose work they admired were artisans or artists would simply not have occurred to them.
What might they have made of Sara Flores? Alongside Shipibo creation myths, Flores has one of her own. As a child, she would lie in bed transfixed by the meshwork of the mosquito net hanging above her. On this, she drew in her mind the Kené patterns she would one day make with her mother. Where the Albers’ pre-Hispanic Mexicans had intuited the truth to materials later preached by the Bauhaus, Flores had discovered something very like the modernist grid.