Suelen da Rocha Novais
Suelen da Rocha Novais (Salvador, 1988) is a visual artist, pharmacist and public health specialist. She graduated from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and holds a specialisation in Health Management from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). With more than ten years devoted to public health, she works in Indigenous healthcare through SESAI (Brazilian Ministry of Health).
Her artistic research investigates the confluences and tensions between allopathic Western science and traditional, ancestral healing technologies, departing from Indigenous and decolonial cosmopolitical thought. She displaces the clinical and epidemiological gaze into the field of contemporary art.
Through what she conceptualises as a curatorial pharmacy, she turns vials, botanical elements and historical fractures into visual manifestations of denunciation, solace and resistance, understanding the body and the forest as living territories. She is currently developing the series Pharmacopoeia of the Invisible, dedicated to Jurema-preta (Mimosa tenuiflora) as a vegetal relative and a subject of knowledge. She lives and works in Salvador, Bahia.
I am a self-taught visual artist, a pharmacist graduated from the Federal University of Bahia, and a public health specialist working in Indigenous healthcare in Bahia. Daily, I navigate the frontier between official science and the living pharmacopeia of the Native peoples I work with. From this friction, my painting is born. I reject an exoticising or purely biological gaze upon the forest: the brush, drawing, oil and watercolour operate as tools for cultural and intellectual demarcation.
- 2026Pharmacopoeia of the Invisible — series of paintings and studies dedicated to Jurema-preta (Mimosa tenuiflora).
- 2026Workshop leader on the Caravana Verger, in Salvador — a project of the Pierre Verger Foundation with Acervo da Laje, supported by Petrobras and the Brazilian Ministry of Culture.
- 202639th UFBA Pharmacy Week — panel “The pharmacist's role in the multicentre study of Indigenous health”, with Mariellen Souza. UFBA School of Pharmacy, 9 September.
- 2026Research dialogues with Indigenous leaders in Bahia and with the Brain Institute of UFRN.
- —Specialisation in Health Management, Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). Degree in Pharmacy, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).