Antún Kojtom, a year after receiving the Rosario Castellanos Medal, he returns to his studio with renewed passion—evident in this new series centered around the complex concept of the Bird-ch’ulel: the cosmic vibration that takes on deeply meaningful forms within Maya cosmology. A birdlike human being, mystical-natural birds, messengers in our everyday world. These are beings from a parallel world, one that seers—including some artists—can access through imagination.

Antún reveals himself as a master of synesthesia: images that evoke auditory and tactile sensations. One sees while hearing the bird’s song. It is the cubist-like “Maya geometry” that lends itself to the multisensory. And when reading the accompanying texts, one can sense the unspoken voice of the Naguales inhabiting their parallel world. Through these images and texts, mythical content rooted in nature is revealed—the habits of birds discovered through Kojtom’s childhood memories in his village of Tenejapa, the beliefs he learned from his culture, and his personal experiences with birds (Naguales).

This exhibition is an experiment, multifaceted in nature; it fragments and reintegrates across different moments and places. Kojtom transforms his painting practice into a process-based, community-centered art. He reintroduces his own image-concepts back into his community of Ch’ixaltontik by creating a charged space beneath the roof of the community court, where he teaches children and youth about local Nagual concepts and inspires them to paint their emotions—grouped by women, men, and mixed collectives. On June 17 of this year, Antún, together with teacher Juan Ramírez Hernández and the local education committee, with his son Alux and support from members of GaleMUY, held a workshop where 36 creators reinvented ch’ulel-driven art with extraordinary results.

The youth fully enter into this exhibition. Their works are shown in Ch’ixaltontik—drawing in visitors from outside—and local youth are invited to participate in the exhibition in San Cristóbal. One imagines a system of “communicating vessels,” where what happens in one place “magically” affects what happens in the other. Contemporary Maya/Zoque art is transterritorial, local and global: g/local.

Galería MUY
(Collective curatorship led by Xun Tontik and the GaleMUY team)
July 2023