SculptureCenter is pleased to announce Édgar Calel: B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone), the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition. B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone) continues artist Édgar Calel’s engagement with the Mayan Kaqchikel cosmovision and the transmission of its concepts and practices to new publics through spaces of contemporary art. Calel’s installations across media connect sites in and around his hometown of Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa), Guatemala, to sites elsewhere through processes of transposition, consistent attention to materials, and local translation. At SculptureCenter, Calel inaugurates B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone), an installation of rock, soil, and fire that connects the essential elements of a site for jun k’obomanik, or giving thanks through offering rituals.
B’alab’äj refers to a specific stone located at the foot of the mountains around Chi Xot, above a valley planted with corn. This stone is significant to the Mayan Kaqchikel for its status as a mediating landmark at which offerings, typically lit candles, can be left to ask ancestors for help for the forthcoming growing seasons. At SculptureCenter, Calel will create a microcosm of this geological and agricultural landscape with an installation of furrowed plots of soil and rock. Within an expanse of earth, stones will be placed to resemble the b’alab’äj, and the artist and SculptureCenter staff will light yellow candles on the rocks each day upon opening the exhibition space. The b’alab’äj imperative to “be thankful for everything we cannot see, but which exists” offers a collective approach to respecting deep knowledge and expressing hope and anticipation for the future. Calel’s works require entrusting devotional forms to an institution and its staff, and its constituents, and the artist views such a collaboration as a means of opening these traditions while remaining in dialogue with ancestral practitioners. His artistic strategies engage with his community’s robust artistic contributions and challenge histories of earthworks and ceremonially-inflected artistic practices in the United States.
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