Huni Kuin MAHKU

Its main spokesperson, Bane Cleiber Pinheiro Sales, is the son of Ibã Sales, the guardian of the knowledge and traditional songs (huni meka) of the Huni Kuin people. In 2009, under the aegis of his father, Bane Cleiber Pinheiro Sales became the first artist to transcribe the chants related to the ayahuasca or Nixi Pae (Banisteriopsis caapi) ritual, creating veritable shamanic partitions in the form of drawings. The chants invoke Yube, the cosmic anaconda and primordial shaman, who is the master of the Nixi Pae, along with a variety of other human and animal entities of the forest. Along with Ibã Sales and Bane Cleiber Pinheiro Sales, the MAHKU includes artists Iran, Isaka, Kixtī, Maná and Txanu. Their works are both a means in which to share their ancestral culture, and a way to consolidate the cultural and territorial autonomy of the Huni Kuin. The MAHKU collective was featured in a major exhibition at the MASP in São Paulo and also participated in the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2024.

The artists' collective Huni Kuin MAHKU (Huni Kuin Artists' Movement) was officially founded in 2013 after a series of several university workshops on drawing that had been organised in the upper reaches of the Rio Jordão, in Brazil, near the Peruvian border.