Edgar Calel (born 1987) is a Maya Kaqchikel artist and poet from Chi Xot, San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. Working across installation, performance, painting, drawing, sculpture and poetry, Calel has developed a practice in which art, spirituality, family, land and everyday life are closely interconnected.
In recent years, his work has entered some of the most important conversations in contemporary art, with presentations at Tate, the Carnegie International, Berlin Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, SculptureCenter, Inhotim and, in 2026, the Art Institute of Chicago and Kunsthalle Bern. (dova.uchicago.edu)
Yet the importance of Calel’s work lies not simply in this rapid institutional recognition. His practice proposes a different way of thinking about what an artwork can be, where its meaning comes from, and even whether conventional ideas such as authorship and ownership are always adequate for understanding it.
From Chi Xot to the international art world
Calel was born into a family of Maya Kaqchikel artists and artisans in the Guatemalan highlands. The landscape, ceremonies, language and communal life of Chi Xot remain fundamental to his work today.
His practice draws upon Maya Kaqchikel knowledge not as historical material but as something living. Dreams, plants, stones, food, family rituals and relationships with the land can all enter the work.
Calel has used the concept of Naoj to describe his practice: an idea encompassing knowledge, wisdom and understanding that does not correspond exactly to the Western category of “art.” His family and community can also participate in the production of works, further questioning the familiar idea of the artist as an isolated individual creator. (kadist.org)
This is an important distinction. Calel does not simply make contemporary artworks about Maya culture. He allows another system of knowledge to determine how the artwork itself is conceived.
When materials remain alive
Stones, fruit, vegetables, earth, plants and other natural elements frequently appear in Calel’s installations. Their importance goes beyond their physical appearance.
A stone can carry spiritual significance. Food can become an offering. A plant can establish a relationship between a particular place, a community and an exhibition thousands of kilometres away.
The materials therefore resist being understood as neutral sculptural elements. They have histories, functions and cycles of their own.
It is here that an interesting dialogue can be established with Bruna Esposito, an artist represented by WIZARD. The two artists come from very different histories and should not be collapsed into the same framework, yet both challenge the hierarchy traditionally separating “art materials” from the materials of ordinary life.
Esposito has long constructed installations from found objects, food, aromas, natural light and other elements whose instability and eventual decay are accepted as part of the work. Her installations depend on the encounter between material, space and viewer rather than on the permanence of an autonomous object. (WIZARD GALLERY)
In Calel, this relationship goes further into ritual and cosmology. A fruit is not merely an unconventional artistic material: it can participate in an offering and carry a relationship between human beings, ancestors and land.
In both practices, however, material is never simply material. What appears ordinary becomes a carrier of memory, experience and meaning.
The work that changed Tate’s idea of collecting
This understanding became particularly significant with Calel’s Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge), 2021.
The installation brings together rocks with fruits and vegetables placed upon them as offerings. The work is connected to Maya Kaqchikel ancestral knowledge and is activated through ritual rather than existing simply as a static arrangement of objects. (artinliverpool.com)
When Tate brought the work into its collection, Calel and Proyectos Ultravioleta proposed an unusual arrangement.
Tate would not own the work permanently.
Instead, the institution entered into a 13-year custodianship, becoming its temporary custodian. The agreement challenged one of the most established conventions of the museum: that collecting means acquiring permanent ownership of an artwork. (Flash Art)
Calel effectively reversed the normal relationship between artwork and institution. Rather than adapting the cultural logic of the work to the museum, the museum had to adapt its own system to the logic surrounding the work.
Memory as something that remains active
A second, less immediate dialogue can be found with Diango Hernández, another artist represented by WIZARD.
Hernández’s practice developed from the experience of growing up and working in Cuba, and memory, displacement and the reconstruction of lived environments have remained important elements of his work. His recent Pools Olaistas, for example, transform architecture and water into imagined spaces suspended between memory, desire and fiction. (WIZARD GALLERY)
Calel’s relationship to memory is fundamentally different. His is rooted in Maya Kaqchikel ancestral knowledge, oral transmission, ritual and community. But the two artists share an understanding that memory is not simply a record of something that has disappeared.
It can be transformed and activated in the present.
For Hernández, remembered places can become new visual and psychological spaces. For Calel, ancestral knowledge continues through gestures, materials, language and ceremonies.
The comparison helps reveal two very different positions within contemporary Latin American art: one shaped by migration and the reconstruction of personal and political memory, the other by Indigenous continuity and the transmission of knowledge across generations.
Art, nature and forms of knowledge
Nature occupies a particularly important position in Calel’s practice.
It is not landscape in the conventional Western art-historical sense—something observed and represented by an artist standing outside it. Instead, human beings, plants, animals, stones and land participate in interconnected systems.
Calel has described needing proximity to the earth for his work, while his installations frequently establish relationships between the specific natural environments in which they are produced or presented. (DAAD Letter)
This is another reason his work feels particularly relevant today. Ecology has become one of contemporary art’s central concerns, but Calel approaches it through a worldview in which the separation between culture and nature was never necessarily the starting point.
An expanding institutional presence
Calel’s international recognition has accelerated significantly.
After participating in the 11th Berlin Biennale in 2020 and the 58th Carnegie International in 2022, he appeared in the Liverpool, Gwangju and São Paulo biennials in 2023. Subsequent solo presentations have included SculptureCenter in New York, Bergen Kunsthall and Inhotim in Brazil. (Liverpool Biennial)
In 2026, his institutional trajectory has continued with exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern and the Art Institute of Chicago, alongside his receipt of the Sam Gilliam Award 2026. (Noticias MCD)
This recognition reflects a wider reconsideration taking place across museums: Indigenous artists are increasingly entering contemporary art history not as representatives of cultures situated outside modernity, but as protagonists actively reshaping its language and institutions.
Why Edgar Calel matters
Edgar Calel’s importance lies partly in the fact that his work does not simply ask for another culture to be included within the existing structures of contemporary art.
It asks whether those structures themselves can change.
Who owns an artwork? Who produces it? What constitutes artistic material? Can knowledge belong to a community rather than an individual? Can an artwork be simultaneously an object, an offering and a ritual?
These questions place Calel within a broader contemporary conversation that can also be traced, through very different approaches, in artists such as Bruna Esposito and Diango Hernández.
Esposito allows everyday and ephemeral materials to retain their instability and lived histories. Hernández transforms personal and cultural memory into new spaces of imagination. Calel introduces another dimension: the possibility that ancestral knowledge itself can determine how an artwork is created, experienced and ultimately cared for.
Together, these positions point toward an understanding of contemporary art in which memory, material and lived experience are not simply subjects represented by art—they are active forces from which art can emerge.