Rituals of Beauty – Feather and Painting - Body Decoration in in the Amazon

What does it mean to be beautiful at the celebrations of an Amazonian Indigenous community? The temporary photo exhibition explores this question through a unique research archive spanning several decades.

The photography exhibition Rituals of Beauty – Feather and Painting - Body Decoration in the Amazon presents a selection from the archive created over nearly half a century of Amazonian fieldwork by the internationally renowned Belgian cultural anthropologist Gustaaf Verswijver. The collection comprises more than 47,000 photographs, approximately 90 hours of film footage, audio recordings, field notes, and nearly 400 objects. With its acquisition by the museum, not only has the material been professionally preserved and made accessible for exhibition, but in the long term it will also be available to researchers and members of the source communities. The present exhibition is the first thematic presentation of this extensive archive.

At the centre of the exhibition are photographs taken between 1974 and 2019 among the Mebengokré (Kayapó) community living in the Brazilian rainforest. A key concept of the exhibition is the Mebengokré term mereremetx, which literally means “those who make themselves beautiful”. The term refers to the ceremonial transformation of the body, ritual dress and adornment, and communal ceremonies, while also expressing the unity and cultural values of the community.

The photographs show how body paintings are created, what meanings are conveyed through colours and patterns, how the body is shaped—for example through ear and lip stretching—and how these practices are connected to myths, age groups and ritual roles. The exhibition not only presents the festive world and concept of beauty of an Amazonian Indigenous community, but also examines how all this is perceived and visually captured by an anthropologist conducting research among them.

Curators: György Szeljak, Judit Csorba, Orsolya Danó