This article focuses on the works of Denilson Baniwa, a prominent artist in the Indigenous contemporary art movement in Brazil. The purpose is to examine views of whiteness, which, in Baniwa’s performances and visual images, intertwines with shamanism and an Amerindian cosmology of predation and revenge. The theoretical approach of the article is not restricted to art history but draws on a broader range of anthropological literature and cultural theory. Furthermore, the article discusses how Baniwa’s art contributes to the cultural debate and research on Brazilian modernism with a critical focus on the issue of race. This foregrounds a critique of how the Brazilian avant-garde claimed to have incorporated Indigenous cosmologies into an anthropophagic sense of Brazilianness. The methodology used in the article is based on visual theory, emphasising the experience of artworks that claim a right to look back. This reframes the viewing of art into a question of friendship and enmity or even life and death.