Claudia Andujar's solidarity with the Yanomami people

In 1972, when photographer Claudia Andujar caught malaria, she left the Catrimani river basin, where she had been sharing the life of a Yanomami extended family for many months, to receive treatment at her São Paulo home. The long journey back south was followed by a frustrating year trying to fully recover. It was during this time away from her Yanomami friends that Andujar perfected many of the visualisation and photographic techniques she brought with her when she finally was able to return. These techniques enabled her and the Yanomami artists she engaged with to create the treasures currently exhibited at the Barbican's Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle. By making visible the paths Yanomami culture takes to renew itself, these works also facilitated new forms of intercultural communication and exchange between Yanomami and White artists like Andujar. She fled from Europe to the USA in 1946 with her mother, after her father and other relatives were killed in Dachau, and moved to Brazil in 1955. For over 50 years Andujar photographed Brazil's Indigenous peoples, particularly the Yanomami. This retrospective exhibition celebrates Andujar's decades of artistic and political engagement with and for the Yanomami and her pioneer art that transmutes death into love and suffering into beauty. These images communicate the sensibilities of intertwined lives across the Amazon region, Europe, and Latin America. They speak of life worth living across differences, especially generational ones