White Cube Bermondsey is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the UK by Sara Flores (b. 1950), one of the foremost contemporary artists emerging from the Amazonian basin.

The exhibition debuts Flores’s first film work alongside new paintings from her ‘Pei Kené’ series, which incorporate botanical motifs into the artist’s intricate Kené textile designs. Kené is an ancient medium central to the Shipibo-Conibo nation, an Indigenous people residing along the Ucayali River to which Flores belongs. The ‘Pei Kené’ works reference both the energy of life and the threat of deforestation faced by Indigenous communities in the Amazon.

Combining two Shipibo words, the exhibition title ‘Bakish Mai’ translates loosely to ‘Land of Yesterday and Tomorrow’, suggesting how an ancestral past may inspire and inform the future. Bakish Mai is also the name of the school co-founded by Flores in Peru, dedicated to the transmission of Indigenous knowledge.