Otherworldly neon faces float among a profusion of shapes and curving lines on the vibrant canvas “Sky Bird Boa Constrictor” by Acelino Huni Kuin. The painting is a commotion of fish, multicoloured birds, leaves and scales, bordered by black-and-white zigzags. Relax your focus and the patterned body of the snake appears, winding itself through the work. The effect is both dreamlike and riotous.

Psychedelic depictions of animals, plants and people are a frequent feature in Mirações (Visions), an exhibition of artists from the Huni Kuin indigenous peoples at the São Paulo Museum of Art. Exploring the mythologies and ancestral tales of the Amazonian tribe, many of the works are inspired by the consumption of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink prepared from jungle plants and used in shamanic rituals for centuries by native South Americans. In a curator’s essay, one of the artists, Ibã Huni Kuin, describes the process of putting the exhibition together as “working in the gallery with music and myth”.

The show is one of a pair that has inaugurated a year of programming dedicated to indigenous histories (or stories, depending on translation) at the cultural institute. This underscores a growing recognition of artists from Brazil’s indigenous populations, who were portrayed in idealised terms by the newly independent nation’s Romanticism movement in the 19th century and then studied as anthropological subjects. Their own cultural output was often not afforded the status of art, instead considered craftsmanship. Now, though, work by Brazil’s original peoples is gaining space in the country’s most prestigious galleries.

“It is a milestone for us to celebrate,” says Guilherme Giufrida, co-curator of Mirações. “Brazil has a history of 500 years of erasure and violence against indigenous peoples, who nevertheless resist.” 

The exhibition brings together 108 pieces by the Huni Kuin Artists Movement, or Mahku, a collective based in the remote state of Acre which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Through tableaux that examine their spiritual relationships with nature and wildlife, as well as cosmological origins stories, we are given a lens into a culture explained on its own terms, rather than through the eyes of outsiders.

Many of the art’s themes are introduced in temporary murals by artists in Mahku that plaster twin staircases in the brutalist building. On one side, a simple geometric design repeats in red and yellow, with tessellating diamonds drawn on the concrete handrail. This kind of pattern is traditionally used in body decorations, basketry and pottery, and now also to frame paintings. On the other side, a procession of bow-laden hunters in tribal headdresses march in profile along the back of a giant crocodile.

In the background, audio plays of the chanting that accompanies the ayahuasca ceremony. These incantations are the main repository of traditional Huni Kuin knowledge and many of the Mahku paintings record the scenes described in them.

Across the large colourful paintings, a distinctive style emerges, eschewing realistic perspective in favour of two-dimensional figures and objects. Colours are typically bold, chromatic and intense, without shading. The works are busy, dense and bright, often containing multiple scenes or movements within the same picture. In a handful of pieces, dots inside geometric designs or the outlines of animals produce a result resembling pointillism.

“They are not landscapes, still lifes or portraits like the western tradition, but they are visualisations of what is seen during specific rituals and also serve as a language,” says Giufrida. “The paintings operate as a record of the stories and myths, as a kind of score for songs about the emergence of the world.”

We see fish attached to boughs of trees, couples copulating, coloured bodiless faces and animals ranging from tapirs to a crab floating alongside water creatures and birds. In one piece, villagers are encircled by a boa constrictor, which occupies a central importance in Huni Kuin folklore as the revealer of the mysteries of ayahuasca.

Another element stressed is the centrality of community life through scenes of hunting, food preparation and dancing. This is reflected in Mahku’s motto “sell art, buy land”. In accordance with this credo, the collective ploughs income from art sales into improving village infrastructure, such as new housing and sanitary facilities.

Saturated colours are visible too on the next floor up in The Tree of Life, an exhibition by Carmézia Emiliano, a self-taught artist from the state of Roraima. Her oeuvre emphasises the community aspects of village life among her Macuxi people, who inhabit the border region between Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil.

The show’s title refers to the myth of the Wazaká tree, which was cut down by a playful deity for the fruits from its top. Mount Roraima, an enormous flat-topped mountain, then rose from its trunk. It figures in Emiliano’s work as a metaphor for fertility or immortality.

It is more than five centuries since the Portuguese first arrived in what they would call Brazil, bringing with them oppression, murder and a marginalisation of the territory’s original inhabitants that continues to this day through illegal logging and mining. These exhibitions open a window into the cultural world of peoples so often depicted or documented by others, but now through their own brushstrokes.

‘Visions’ runs to June 4, ‘Tree of Life’ to June 11, masp.org.br