A Group Exhibition at Kornfeld Galerie Exploring Rhythm as Memory, Resistance, and Cultural Transmission
Ehuana Yaira Yanomami, This is how we women adorn ourselves. This is how we look when we celebrate the reahu feast. And when we dress up like this, we dance with each other and also with the men. This is how we adorn ourselves when the reahu feast takes place.This is how we women adorn ourselves. This is how we look when we celebrate the reahu feast. And when we dress up like this, we dance with each other and also with the men. This is how we adorn ourselves when the reahu feast takes place. we celebrate the reahu feast. And when we dress up like this, we dance with each other and also with the men. This is how we adorn ourselves when the reahu feast takes place, 2022. Felt tip, crayon and Graphite on paper felt tip, 42 x 29.7cm. Courtesy of the artist and Kornfeld Galerie Berlin.
Curated by Tereza de Arruda, ‘Rhythm & Soul’ unfolds at Kornfeld Galerie Berlin as a meditation on how image, ritual, and popular form carry memory across generations, from Yanomami worlds to Afro-Brazilian modernism and contemporary practice.
In January 2026, Kornfeld Galerie Berlin opened ‘Rhythm & Soul’, a group exhibition that moves between sound and silence, ceremony and everyday life, and the politics of visibility. Presented across painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, the exhibition approaches rhythm not only as a musical structure, but as a way of holding time, transmitting knowledge, and sustaining community.
Yanomami Artists Centre: Lived Continuity and Collective Knowledge
A central thread is the presence of Yanomami artists Ehuana Yaira Yanomami and Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami, whose works insist on lived continuity rather than ethnographic distance. Ehuana Yaira Yanomami’s drawings speak directly about adornment, collective celebration, and the Reahu feast, expanding portraiture into a social field shaped by dance, labour, and the defence of land.
Other works address preparation, gathering, and ecological protection, positioning drawing as testimony and resistance, while later pieces articulate multilingual solidarity among Yanomami women as a form of strength rooted in birth, language, and collective survival.
Material Histories: Sound, Jewellery, and the Politics of Form
Material choices throughout the exhibition reinforce its interest in translation and hybridity. Alex Flemming’s acrylic works on LP records foreground sound as both archive and surface, transforming a familiar object of circulation into a site of abstraction and repetition. Nádia Taquary’s beaded works, composed of glass beads, African cowries, copper, and silver, introduce jewellery as a sculptural language of lineage, ritual, and exchange.
Encounters between modern and contemporary Brazilian practices further shape the exhibition. Paintings by Heitor dos Prazeres sit alongside new work, allowing questions of labour, social life, and pictorial rhythm to reverberate across decades. Woodcuts by Francisco De Almeida extend this emphasis on graphic force and narrative charge, where the line becomes both image and pulse.
Contemporary Interventions and the Body as Frequency
Contemporary works push these concerns into new registers. José Gomes’s photographs on dibond, worked with oil stick, create friction between documentary surface and painterly intervention, while titles that invoke mythic presences position folklore as a living framework rather than a distant reference. Works by muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi propose the body as both parable and frequency, opening a space where image becomes vibration, instruction, and passage.
Rather than pursuing a single aesthetic, ‘Rhythm & Soul’ assembles a field of relations: the ceremonial and the urban, the drawn and the sung, the ancestral and the newly improvised. In doing so, the exhibition reads rhythm as an ethical proposition, grounded in shared time, collective listening, and the persistence of cultural knowledge under pressure.
‘Rhythm & Soul’ runs from 15 January to 28 February 2026 at Kornfeld Galerie Berlin. For more information, visit galeriekornfeld.com.
