Gabriel Chaile (b. 1985, San Miguel de Tucumán) presented a transformative sculptural installation that continued his investigations which invited participants to generate new collaborative and ritual spaces.
Chaile’s practice draws on the histories of his homeland in northwestern Argentina, as well as archaeological and ethnographic ceramic artefacts from the region. The artist describes his work as investigating a "genealogy of form", uncovering and affirming remains of the past. His works poetically embody ancestral knowledge and Indigenous beliefs erased and suppressed by colonialism and its ongoing legacies. Collaboration and exchange are key to Chaile's work, and his large–scale sculptures trace objects associated with these ideas, such as vessels, pots and clay ovens. His practice has previously encompassed nomadic culinary projects, communal meals, and founding NVS, an experimental space to bring together an international network of artists, friends and colleagues.
As a continuation of this work, the artist collaborated with Laura Ojeda Bär (b. 1986. Buenos Aires) to conceive Usos y costumbres, building on their shared interest in how visual forms circulate, are valued and hold power. Pointing to the symbolic and functional materials which characterise Chaile’s works, the exhibition’s title Usos y costumbres can be translated as ‘customs and traditions’ or literally, ‘uses and customs’. The phrase also alludes to the conventions of gallery and museological display, which the artists have radically reimagined.
Chaile entirely covered the space with clay, referencing the historic churches and houses of Argentina that are commonly made from compacted earth and adobe bricks. This monumental gesture envelops the viewer within an environment that both incorporates the gallery’s former use as a chapel and fully reconceives its architecture. Many of Ojeda Bär’s paintings derive from online documentation of sculptures held in London museums, ranging from contemporary artworks to contested antiquities shown within vitrines. These miniaturised works were sculpted into the richly tactile, terracotta-coloured walls, which form a malleable container for Ojeda Bär’s paintings. Elsewhere, her paintings expanded the fantastical possibilities of the room, introducing windows and skylights into the adobe structure.
Chaile and Ojeda Bär proposed Usos y costumbres as a space for experimentation and dialogue, creating new conditions in which to encounter each other's practices. Collectively, they reconfigure narratives across art history and contemporary life to offer new emotional, political and cultural relationships between the past and the present.
