The Pavilion of Ecuador at Biennale Arte 2026 presents Tawna & Oscar, an exhibition that challenges dominant ways of organizing life, knowledge, and territory. Featuring the Tawna collective and Oscar Santillán, and curated by Manuela Moscoso with the support of its commissioner, the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art of Ecuador (MAAC), the project approaches art as a practice of attention.
Tawna & Oscar brings together the practices of Oscar Santillán and the Tawna collective to present two contemporary ways of thinking and making the world through relation. The project proposes an approach to art that moves away from fixed categories and closed hierarchies, focusing instead on processes of exchange that unfold across bodies, languages, territories, and times.
Curated by Manuela Moscoso, the Pavilion of Ecuador is conceived as a space of attention and listening. Rather
than offering a single narrative, it invites visitors to slow down and engage with forms of knowledge that are often overlooked within dominant cultural frameworks. Emerging from Andean-Amazonian territories marked by linguistic, cultural, and ecological plurality, the project advances a situated position that understands knowledge as something produced through shared experience and ongoing relation.
The practice of the Tawna collective is rooted in Pan-Amazonian ways of thinking that conceive existence as an
active continuity among bodies, territories, and forces. Working from community-based and embodied
experiences, Tawna understands sexuality and dreaming as sensitive technologies through which life is oriented, knowledge is transmitted, and care is organized. In their practice, language functions not as a distant representation but as a living force that participates in the making of the world, activating connections between the personal, the collective, and the spiritual.
Oscar Santillán’s practice explores what exists beyond established notions of reality: those conditions that escape dominant systems of order and open other ways of perceiving the world. Moving across science, emerging technologies, and ancestral knowledge, his work insists on indeterminacy as a fundamental condition of life. From this perspective, the terrestrial, the technological, and the cosmic are understood as interconnected and continuously shaping one another.
The encounter between Tawna and Santillán does not aim for synthesis or resolution. Instead, it sustains an open space in which different ways of inhabiting and understanding the world can coexist without being reduced to a single framework. Art operates here as a practice that holds this openness, creating the conditions for new forms of perception, relation, and coexistence. Rather than representing a fixed national identity, Tawna & Oscar proposes a contemporary position grounded in situated knowledge, relation, and material responsibility, offering tools to think with the present and imagine multiple possible worlds.
COMMISSIONER
The Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art (MAAC) is a key cultural institution in Ecuador, dedicated
to preserving archaeological and modern heritage, promoting contemporary art, and serving as a bridge between the country’s historical memory and its present cultural landscape. As custodian of 60,000 pre-Hispanic archaeological objects and 3,500 works of modern and contemporary art, the MAAC fosters spaces for encounter, critical reflection, and research. With approximately 120,000 annual visitors and a strong public program, it has established itself as a dynamic institution with an international outlook.
CURATOR
MANUELA MOSCOSO is the inaugural Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and, in 2025, curated the 2a Bienal das Amazônias. Formerly curator of the Liverpool Biennial
(2021) and a senior curator at Museo Tamayo, Moscoso focuses her work on relational, political, and embodied
approaches to contemporary art and institutions.
EXHIBITORS
OSCAR SANTILLÁN is an Ecuadorian artist working between Ecuador and the Netherlands. His practice explores science, ancestral technologies, and the concept of the “Anti-world,” dissolving boundaries between the
natural and artificial. His work has been shown internationally, and he is active in art education.
TAWNA is an anti-colonial collective of Sápara, Kichwa, and mestizo artists founded in 2017. Working with video, photography, and living archives, they create narratives from Amazonian territories through ritual, dreaming, and community-based processes. Their work has been shown internationally.
//
Image: Curator Manuela Moscoso and artists TAWNA and Oscar Santillan. Courtesy MAAC
