Artist
Olinda Tupinambá
Artist
Artist Bio
Olinda Tupinambá (b.1989, Pau Brasil, BA) is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, performer, and curator from the Tupinambá and Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe peoples in Bahia, Brazil. Her practice interlaces performance, film, and environmental activism. Among her film works are Kaapora: The Call of the Forest (2020) and Ibirapema (2022), which illustrate her approach to Indigenous storytelling and environmental resistance. In 2024, she represented Brazil at the 60th Venice Biennale with her installation Balance at the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion. Her work has been featured in institutions such as the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP), the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and the Museum of Image and Sound in Ceará, Brazil.
In 2025, she presented performances at the Theaterformen Festival in Germany and exhibited at Verso Gallery in Lisbon. Olinda has curated numerous film programmes, including Caméra-Flèche: Voies du cinéma autochtone au Brésil in Paris and Piracema Nu Bai in Lisbon, as well as Brazilian festivals such as Cine Kurumin, Amotara – Indigenous Women’s Perspectives, and the Kaapora Festival of Indigenous and Environmental Film, which she directs. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the PIPA Prize in Brazil and was a guest speaker at Brown, Duke, and Yale universities in the United States. From 2025 to 2026, she will co-lead the project Environmental Education and Film in the Atlantic Forest: Eco-Activism Through Indigenous Perspectives, as part of a British Academy ODA Global Innovation Fellowship alongside the University of London.
Artwork Description
In this photograph, a water entity symbolising the ancestral force that inhabits rivers and seas emerges to confront our times. Her body is made of water, yet it carries the weight of human neglect. From her mouth, she pulls out a piece of plastic: a symbolic and visceral gesture – a living denunciation of the pollution that silences the oceans and threatens fragile coral reefs. She does not speak – she does not need to. Her silence carries the cry of marine creatures, suffocated by excess, by waste, by indifference. This work is a visual manifesto, blending poetry and politics, and calling the viewer to ecological responsibility. It is not a fable – it is a mirror held up to our pressing reality.
Original artwork created with the support of Christal Galeria.
