Art Basel Miami Beach | Yawanawá & Refik Anadol: Miami Beach Convention Center

04 - 06 December
  • “For us, the forest is not a resource, it is a living being that we are a part of. Through this work with Refik and Efsun, our art and our spirituality have found new ways to travel, carrying the voice of our ancestors into new worlds.” - Chief Biraci Brasil Nixiwaka Yawanawa

     

  • At Zero 10, Art Basel’s initiative for art of the digital era, the original drawings by Yawanawa artists Nawashahu and Mukashahu are revealed alongside the digital artworks they created with Refik Anadol for Winds of Yawanawa (2023), presented together with three new canvas works commissioned by Scorpios to mark the project’s latest chapter.

     

    Presented by Scorpios in collaboration with HOFA Gallery and Instituto Nixiwaka at Art Basel Miami Beach. VIP Preview: 2–3 December 2026; Public Days: 4–6 December 2026.

  • © Video courtesy of Thomas Zikos represented by Mia Dorier for Scorpios

  • The Yawanawa, an Indigenous people of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon, and media artist Refik Anadol will present a new exploration of their 2023 collaboration, Winds of Yawanawa, at Zero 10, Art Basel Miami Beach 2026. Presented by Scorpios in collaboration with HOFA Gallery and Instituto Nixiwaka, the installation brings together the original drawings behind the digital artworks, selected works from the resulting collection and three newly commissioned canvases by Yawanawa artists Nawashahu and Mukashahu. The presentation forms part of Generation, the 2026 Miami Beach edition of Zero 10, curated by Karen Archey with Eli Scheinman. VIP Preview Days take place on 2–3 December 2026, followed by public days from 4–6 December 2026. 

     

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  • The Yawanawa secured legal recognition of their territory in the 1980s and have since worked to revive their language, ceremonies and music. Winds of Yawanawa, commissioned for Scorpios, grew from weeks Anadol and his studio spent at Aldeia Sagrada. In Anadol’s account, Nawashahu and Mukashahu Yawanawa made their works after the studio asked how the Yawanawa wished their culture to be represented. At the 2023 launch, Chief Biraci Brasil Nixiwaka Yawanawa described their drawings, like his people’s songs, as coming from the community’s women.

     

    Refik Anadol Studio trained its AI model on the artists’ works, together with studio imagery, to generate new images from their colours, forms and patterns. Readings from a weather station at Aldeia Sagrada then shape how those images move, and the soundtracks draw on Yawanawa chants.

     

    The  Winds of Yawanawa launched Scorpios’ Encounters art and culture programme at Scorpios Mykonos in 2023, curated with HOFA Gallery, and by 2025 had raised $3 million for the Yawanawa, according to TIME.

  • “Each stroke carries the beauty of nature, the strength of ancestry and the magic of a spiritual world.” – Nawashahu Yawanawa
  • REFIK ANADOL

    REFIK ANADOL

    Refik Anadol is an award-winning media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence and in digital art collectibles. Refik “paints” with data to create mesmerizing, large-scale digital artworks that address what it means to be a human in the age of AI, with his work occupying the intersection of art, science, and technology.

    Across his 3D data sculptures and paintings, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations, the artist takes what was once invisible to the human eye, and renders it visible. Whether that consists of buildings coming to life and disappearing into infinity, or breathtaking aesthetics that take shape from large swaths of data — Refik’s immersive environments offer a new perspective on the world, with a distinct aesthetic technique emerging out of machine intelligence.


    Data emerges as a persistent theme across Refik’s work. He has trained a machine model to go through MoMA’s 200 year art collection and reimagine the history of modern art. He created a “data sculpture” of an alternative reality of nature, using 200 million online photos of Earth for the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. Refik also used 70 terabytes of MRI brain scans to create an immersive installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale inspired by the human mind, and for an artwork at Kraftwerk Berlin, visitors provided real time data for AI generation - visible in the form of a hallucinogenic LED screen painting.


    The Turkish-born, LA-based artist’s work has been shown across the world at public landmarks, major art museums and festivals. “What are the challenges and possibilities that computing has imposed on humanity?” Refik’s work asks. He examines how our ideas of time and space are changing, as machines increasingly dominate our lives.

  • Nawashahu and Mukashahu Yawanawa

    Nawashahu and Mukashahu Yawanawa

    Winds of Yawanawa was developed from drawings by Nawashahu and Mukashahu Yawanawa, combined with environmental data recorded at Aldeia Sagrada, the community’s sacred village, through Refik Anadol Studio’s AI-based process. Since its launch at Scorpios Mykonos in 2023, audiences have encountered the collaboration principally through its digital works. Miami brings the source drawings into view through a new print release, alongside digital works and new paintings inspired by the original imagery, offering a full account of the collaboration’s artistic development. 

     

    The installation includes a new collector print release, titled Breathing Forest, comprising twenty-five high-resolution reproductions of the original Yawanawa drawings used as source material for Refik Anadol Studio’s AI model. These works are presented alongside three new canvases by Nawashahu and Mukashahu Yawanawa, commissioned by Scorpios and inspired by the original drawings. Together, they reveal the relationship between the artists’ physical practice and the computational works developed from their imagery.

     

    A monumental display of twelve screens presents the digital works from the 1,000-piece Winds of Yawanawa digital art collection. Alongside the digital display, prints derived from the original drawings and three newly commissioned canvases allow visitors to encounter the Yawanawa artists’ work both independently and in relation to the digital collaboration.

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