Edgar Calel

“I have always wanted my work to be related to the place where I was born and where my body first learned to vibrate in the world – I carry a culture within me.” – Edgar Calel

As a visual artist and poet, Calel engages with topics related to the rich cultural heritage and rituals of Guatemala’s midwestern highlands, where he resides. Hailing from a family of Maya-Kaqchikel artists and artisans, Calel works across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, often engaging with sites and traditions around his hometown of Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa) as creative touchstones for works that meticulously interconnect localities, at home and internationally. The artist’s primary concerns include exploring the complexities of Indigenous experiences and representing the Maya-Kaqchikel worldview to new publics. Calel, a leading voice of institutional critique among Latin American artists, frequently addresses power dynamics and historical shifts while raising the profile of Indigenous peoples through an anticolonial transmission of living beliefs and customs.

Calel’s works are often grounded in attentive relationships with the earth, its elements, and animal-vegetal motifs and are known to playfully challenge Western conventions and perspectives of permanence. The artist’s use of the Kaqchikel language, transpositional awareness, and the reflexivity of his presence in the places he travels belong to a practice celebratory of the daily role of spirituality among his people and vigilant toward daily threats of exclusion and cultural erasure, particularly in relation to the violence and aftermath of the Guatemalan Civil War.

Against the backdrop of Guatemala’s colonial history, where a perennial plundering of land and resources has disrupted Indigenous ways of life for centuries, Maya-Kaqchikel life and family remain central to Calel’s artistic practice, influencing his process and discourse. His work, often centered on themes of home and care, reflects a belief in creativity as a communal and inherited endeavor linked to nourishment, continuity, and the preservation and transmission of ancestral knowledge.

In the Maya-Kaqchikel tradition, personhood is a relational status that surpasses the Western notion of individuality. The Kaqchikel language, for example, has no direct word for “art” but rather translates our concept of artistic production as knowledge-wisdom-understanding or a sacred state of thinking. In Calel’s practice, art serves as both material expression and sets of rituals intrinsically embodying communal solidarity. His exploration of personhood within Maya cosmology invites a rethinking of kin-based relationships with non-human entities. Calel’s work ultimately embodies a philosophy in which the land itself is alive and a reading of human and non-human agency as inextricable from our surroundings.

Edgar Calel (b. 1987, Chi Xot [San Juan Comalapa], Guatemala) Lives and works in Chi Xot.

Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Mendes Wood DM, Archipelago, Germantown (2024); Desanexo do Desapê, São Paulo (2023); Sculpture Center, New York (2023); Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2022).

Selected group exhibitions have been held at Tate Modern, London (2025); Armada Galería, Mexico City (2024); Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2023); 35th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2023); Galeria de artistas, São Paulo (2023); Soft Power, Berlin (2023); 12th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2023); 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2023); Casa de Hierro, Guatemala City (2023); Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2023); SESC Pompéia, São Paulo (2022); 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); Centro Cultural de España, Guatemala City (2022).

Calel’s work is included in institutional collections including Fundación Teor/ética, Kadist Foundation, MADC Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, National Gallery of Canada, Rijkscollectie – National Collection of the Netherlands, and Tate Modern.