PH Joel

P. H. Joel (1992), belonging to the Tseltal Maya people, challenges, through his own experience, the traditional indigenous identity concept of belonging to a single people, as established by academia. He sees himself as a melting pot of identities, with a Tsotsil father and a Ch’ol mother, born in a Tseltal territory known as the Lacandon Jungle, where his artistic practice germinates.

His works do not represent, but rather inhabit membranes that capture the memory of his peoples from materials that are part of their natural environment, cohesively bringing together the knowledge he has unraveled for several years in a context of social transformation, violence and devastation of the territory caused by cattle ranching, deforestation, drug trafficking, but he also disrupts tradition when he hybridizes traditional/local materials with electronic/global devices to express the contemporaneity of the daily life of the jungle peoples as a countercurrent to the exoticization of the native peoples and the mythification of the jungle disseminated by the tourism sector.

Joel discusses the desacralization of nature, eradicates the collective memory of his people, denounces the archaeological looting committed by the State and foreigners, or simply documents the accelerated transformation of the life of the people to which he belongs caused by the irruption of technology, globalization and consumerism through electronic devices that reveal to the population the attractive digital territory.

Anthropology is his tool for investigating and analyzing the social phenomena that are part of his interest, and artistic expressions are his means of recording them, but he never limits himself to speaking, defining, or recording, but primarily to living, experiencing, and questioning within the context that surrounds his territory, which is why he gave up living in the city to be immersed in his village and the jungle.

Awards and Recognition:

• Main UN Art Prize for Indigenous Artists Worldwide, Geneva, Switzerland, 2024.
• Academic Background:
  Bachelor’s Degree in Social Anthropology, 2010-2014, Faculty of Social Sciences, Campus III, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.

Solo Exhibitions:

• Tana vo’ne: Extirpation and Reinvention of Memory, MUY Gallery, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, 2023/4.
• Of Gods and Cyborgs, sculpture and paintings on ceramics, solo exhibition, MUY Gallery, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, 2019.

Group Exhibitions:

• (REBEL AND REVEL) Art, Rebellion, and Resistance Toward the Day After, Caracol de Jacinto Canek, Caracol de Oventik, and CIDECI in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, 2025.
• Festival of Culture and Peace, Lacanjá Chansayab, Lacandon Jungle, Ocosingo, Chiapas, Mexico, 2025.
• The Encounter, Kates-Ferri Projects, 561 Grand Street, Manhattan, New York, 2025.
• Art, Minorities, and Human Rights, Ecolint Centre des Arts, Geneva, Switzerland, 2024.
• Routes of Resistance, SKISSERNAS MUSEUM (Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art), Lund, Sweden, 2024.
• Art, Territories of Denunciation, Tlatelolco Cultural Center, Mexico City, 2024.
• Art of the Peoples of Mexico, Indigenous Disruptions. Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City, 2022.
• First International Festival of Azul Maya Ch’oj, organized by SDCELAR and The British Museum in Dzan, Yucatán. 2022.
• Virtual Cycle of Listening and Knowledge Exchange on Music and Sound of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico and Colombia. Episode IV “Alone with Näwayomo: Contemporary Maya and Zoque Sound.” Museo Universitario del Chopo. 2021.
• International Painting Triennial at CECUT. Baja California, 2021.
• Alone with Näwayomo (Alone with the Goddess of Water), Performance in collaboration with Saúl Kak, Art Week, ZonaMaco, Mexico City, 2021.
• Transborder Maya Project, Exhibition at the Spanish Cultural Center, Guatemala. September 3, 2020.
• Visions of Resistance from Contemporary Maya Art, La Esmeralda, Mexico City. July, 2020.

Residencies:

• Artistic Residency at Furiaca, San José del Pacífico, Oaxaca, Mexico.
• Pre-Hispanic Molds, Ánfora Studio, September 2022, Mexico City.
• Polychrome Clay and Pre-Hispanic Colors, February–December 2019, MUY Art Space, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico.

Publications

• PH (2024), Tana vo’ne, Extirpation and Reinvention of Memory, Ona Ediciones.
• UN (2024), Memory in the Present, exhibition catalogue, International Art Contest.