Ocopa (1-3)

Ofri Lapid’s work explores the social and political agencies at work in the creation of cultural heritage and how they manifest themselves in academic research, fieldwork and within a museum context. Lapid's annual editions are copies of ink drawings by a missionary from the 1920s that she came across in the Santa Rosa de Ocopa monastery in Peru. They depict typical designs that the Conibo – one of the indigenous tribes of the upper Amazon – paint onto fabric, ceramics and their bodies and that stand for cosmological, natural or visionary landscapes. Based on their own cultural understanding, missionaries, ethnographers and anthropologists have interpreted the Conibo designs as mnemonic systems or a record of some description. Painted onto fabric using traditional techniques, Lapid reintegrates the missionary's drawings and comments upon questions of origin, appropriation and the recording of local culture.

Ofri Lapid is currently writing her PhD thesis on the native stories from Peru at HFBK Hamburg. She had group and solo exhibitions at a.o. NGBK, Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Arteles residency exhibition, Finland, Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv, Centro Selva residency, Pucallpa, Habitat Centre, New Delhi and Kala Ghoda Gallery, Mumbai.