The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is proud to present Chonon Bensho: Biri biri imaboi / Your fingertips will glow, the first solo exhibition in the United States by Shipibo-Konibo artist, poet, and scholar Chonon Bensho (b. 1992, Santa Clara de Yarinacocha, Ucayali, Peru). Bringing together drawings and recited poems, the exhibition foregrounds Bensho’s sustained engagement with kené—an intricate geometric visual language that encodes systems of knowledge and healing within Shipibo-Konibo cosmology—across her multidisciplinary practice.
For the Shipibo-Konibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, dreams and visions function as channels of communication between human and nonhuman realms, transmitting knowledge through encounters with spirits and ancestors. Women artists and healers, or onanyas, have long translated these messages through kené, passing down its forms and meanings across generations. Bensho continues and extends these traditions through an artistic practice that reflects on the tenets of Shipibo-Konibo life through drawing, embroidery, painting, and poetry. The exhibition takes its title from her poem “Kewe nete,” in which Bensho reflects on the spiritual process of transmitting ancestral knowledge through drawing kené: “When you sit down to design / the tips of your fingers will glow” (Yasan ketana / Biri biri imaboi).
The exhibition is organized around a series of detailed ink and graphite drawings from 2023, which incorporate kené motifs to reflect on the principles of Shipibo-Konibo continuity and interdependent relationships between species throughout the natural world. These works are presented alongside the artist’s poema cantos—sung poems developed in tandem with her visual process—presented through audio recordings that foreground voice as a generative force within her practice. The exhibition also includes select publications, among them Non onan shinan: Los mundos medicinales y la sabiduría de una familia Shipibo-Konibo, co-authored with Pedro Favaron, which situates Bensho’s work within a broader framework of medicinal knowledge.
By integrating ancestral practices with contemporary artistic strategies, Bensho establishes a distinct practice that bridges past and present. The exhibition invites visitors to engage with her work as both visual memory and an epistemological system—one that prompts reflection on the relationships between humans, the natural world, and the forms of knowledge we inherit and transmit within it.
Chonon Bensho: Biri biri imaboi / Your fingertips will glow is curated by Starasea Camara.
Starasea Nidiala Camara is a curator and scholar whose practice centers Black cultural and artistic production throughout the Americas. She is currently the curatorial and public engagement assistant at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) in New York City, where she has supported the organization of exhibitions including Diana Dowek: Uprising in the Mirror and Violaciones Domésticas: Feminist Constellations in 1990s Argentina (2025). In 2025 she was nominated as a fellow in the second cohort of the Early Stage Art Professionals Fellowship with the A&L Berg Foundation. She has previously held positions with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Emerging Curators Institute, Souls Grown Deep Foundation, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Modern Art. Camara’s curatorial projects include In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2020), and Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend at the National Quilt Museum (2025). Recently, her writing has been featured in the publications Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem and the 36th Bienal de São Paulo catalogue, Not All Travelers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice.