Anita Ekman is a Brazilian visual and performance artist and researcher of rock art, pre-colonial art and rainforest history.
Her collaborative performances at archaeological sites and in museum collections analyse the Atlantic World and the role of women in the South America´s Tropical Rainforest. Developing a series of photographs and videos based on these performances, Anita and her collaborators such as Sandra Benites (Guaraní Nhandeva, anthropologist and curator) discuss the leading role of Indigenous people allied to the African Diaspora in the history of the Atlantic Rainforest and Amazon.
She has given lectures at universities such as Indiana, Tufts, and Harvard, while her artworks have been published on museum websites such as MoMA, Harvard's Peabody Museum, and in Od Review and Select.
She is co-curator with Sandra Benites, also a Clark Fellow for summer 2023, of the exhibition Ka'a Body: Cosmovision of the Rainforest at Paradise Row in London and Radicantes in Paris. At the Clark, Ekman and Benites intend to jointly produce a publication based on the concepts of body-territory and Indigenous territoriality. This new work will examine how women in contemporary Indigenous and Brazilian art are transforming the global imagination of forests and their human and non-human inhabitants.
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I believe that Anita Ekman is one of the most remarkable and important artists and intellectuals working today. As her beautiful images and carefully considered written reflections attest, her art and activism are influenced by a profound sense of ethical obligation to the history of the work done by generations of women artists.
Christoph Irmscher, director of the Wells Scholars Program and Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University.
Anita Ekman in MUSA - Museu da Amazônia by Luca Meola, 2022.