“Manuel Chavajay: Xojowi ja qa tee ruachulew” (Mother Earth Dances) is the first one-person institutional exhibition of the Tz’utujil Maya artist Manuel Chavajay (b. 1982, San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, where he lives). The exhibition presents eleven works produced over the past three years, including paintings made with marine oil and featuring traditional embroidery patterns depicting the landscape around Lake Atitlán, intervened earthenware pots, and remnants of site-specific performances. Together, the works focus on two important themes that have developed in Chavajay’s work: a growing concern over the increased pollution of Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan Highlands, where the Tz’utujil live, and an ongoing meditation on the connection of the land to the cosmos, as understood in Tz’utujil ancestral knowledge.
Making Tz’utujil language and land a frequent reference in his work, Chavajay connects them to the complex history of Guatemala, its indigenous heritage, its incomplete and compressed modernization, and more recent efforts toward stability and development. Land—including Lake Atitlán—in the context of his work is understood not as a resource to extract or as an inert ground but as a core aspect of indigenous identity, tracing historical connections, cultural practices, and ancestral legacies. For Chavajay, the definition of land itself is capacious. Along with the physical territory, the artist is thinking about changes of light and season, cyclically reiterated omens and rhythms, as well as immaterial forces, not least those that take the shape of knowledge-bearing dreams.
Chavajay’s work has been presented at institutions such as El Museo del Barrio, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), Santiago de Compostela; Casa del Lago UNAM, Mexico City; Manifesta 15, Barcelona; Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York; El Espacio 23, Miami; Kunsthalle Wien Museumplatz, Vienna; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California. He has also participated in a number of biennials, including the 35th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; Bienal SIART, La Paz, Bolivia; the Curitiba Biennial of Contemporary Art, Paraná, Brazil; Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala City, Guatemala; and the Bienal de Artes Visuales del Istmo Centroamericano (BAVIC), held across Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador. Chavajay’s work is in the institutional collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fundación Ortiz Gurdián, León, Nicaragua; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, among others.
“Manuel Chavajay: Xojowi ja qa tee ruachulew” is presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and curated by Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.
