From Ritual Critique to Secular Harvest: Denilson Baniwa’s Museum Investments

In November 2018, indigenous Brazilian artist Denilson Baniwa staged a ritual intervention at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, one of the largest stages in Brazilian contemporary art. Critiquing the exhibition’s representation of indigenous people, Denilson marched through the galleries wearing a yellow jaguar mask and a leopard cape, inhabiting the “jaguar-shaman”—a Baniwa intermediary between human, animal, plant and more-than-human worlds. “Hacking” the biennial, he performed a ritual critique, contesting ideas about modernity and indigenous art while confronting the exhibition’s complicity in settler colonialism. This paper analyzes this performance and its afterlife. Using the framework of “secular aesthetics,” I argue Denilson’s ritual critique was a constitutive part of his attachment to the museum as an institution with redemptive potential for civic life. I analyze his work to demonstrate the “absorptive quality” of secular aesthetics, showing how art museums have absorbed and performed ritual critiques, exhibitionary alternatives, and decolonial imaginaries.