Weaving the Present: Claudia Alarcón & Silät at the De La Warr Pavilion
June 23, 2025
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
Tayhin is the term for weaving in the languages of the Wichí, who live in the Gran Chaco, a forest region spanning the north of Argentina, eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, and into Brazil. The intransitive verb can also refer to re/re-constructing and healing, and now lends its name to an exhibition of textiles woven from the hand-spun fibres of the chaguar plant - a being, material, and practice deeply rooted in their cultures and communities.
These net-like works are created by Silät, an intergenerational collective of over one hundred weaver women from indigenous communities in Alto la Sierra and La Puntana in Argentina, represented by artist Claudia Alarcón and curator Andrei Fernández. ‘The work is ancestral,’ says one of the weavers in a short documentary, referring to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge through their practice. ‘Now I am old, and I carry it on. I carry on weaving.’
The film, installed alongside their successive exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York and now Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, may be intended to visualise or contextualise the process of making. However, the practice and product are non-verbal expressions of communication. Close attention is paid to the weavers’ hands at work. The narration and subtitles are kept to a minimum; the soundtrack of songs and conversations is consciously untranslated. ‘Everything is there in the work,’ says Alarcón, gesturing to the textiles, which look as though they are chain-stitched. (Elsewhere, artists like Alia Farid suggest this approach to tapestry-making reflects and reinforces the strength of these traditions.)
The artist is critically aware of translation processes between verbal, written, and visual languages. She positions herself as an intermediary between her community and the Argentine state, predominantly Western European publics and patrons of their work. Alarcón is one of the few with command of both Wichí and Spanish, as a result of state schooling. Though Argentina formally asserted independence from the Spanish Empire in 1816, the Spanish language remains predominant, whilst English has become a compulsory part of primary education in certain provinces. This is to the continued detriment of indigenous communities and internal cohesion, a relationship between political centres and perceived peripheries present in the more northern Andean countries like Peru, as reflected in the works of Claudia Martínez Garay.
The collective’s work directly contributes to traditions of geometric abstraction in South America; left hanging is the question of how deeply Western European modernisms were tied to such textile practices. ‘Influence’ is a concept that is still unevenly applied. Whilst working from Chile, Felipe Mujica - who, like Martínez Garay, has new connections to Nottingham – is more readily related to Josef Albers and other leaders in colour theory. Silät’s work, however, resonates more strongly with Anni Albers, who engaged with these same Wichí traditions in the 1950s. Albers collected chaguar textiles from the province of Salta in Argentina, as featured in her formative text, On Weaving (1965). From them, gallerist Cecilia Brunson asserts, ‘she extracted geometric principles and weaving techniques’ in developing her own ‘pioneering’ practice.
Alarcón & Silät propose these pre-Columbian designs as places of experimentation, of future thinking, not static or anonymous historical traditions. Simultaneously, Alarcón has opened the collective’s practice to Albers’ influences, inviting their critical reflections on the enduring fascination with ‘indigenous cultures’ in Western Europe and exchanges or two-way flows.
Tayhin joins exhibitions like the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), a more explicit investigation into ‘pre-modern modernisms’ beyond Western Europe, focusing particularly on the Bauhaus. Alarcón & Silät’s work thus finds a good home in the De La Warr Pavilion, which, in the words of Filipa Ramos, is a construct of the same mid-century climate of art, architecture, and design as that displaced, migratory ‘school’.
Joseph Constable, curator at the Pavilion, highlights that the exhibition resists the typical ethnographic framing of indigenous contemporary art practices. Most of the works in Tayhin were made in the last few years, further challenging the temporal othering of indigenous identities and lived experiences. Indeed, the distinctive neon yellow of Alarcón’s trainers matches the thread used for her woven bag, one of many which overtook a wall in their New York exhibition, hinting at the potential commodification of their practice. ‘The important thing is that everyone now knows that we are here, part of this land, alive and resisting,’ Alarcón asserts, of the collective’s increasing international recognition. ‘We are always in solidarity, seeking respect and value for us and our work, for who we are and what we want to be, in honour of our ancestors. We will continue fighting!’
Beneath Tayhin is an exhibition by Rio de Janeiro-based artist Allan Weber, which travels from Nottingham Contemporary. (In New York, James Cohan presents a group exhibition including the work of Daniel Lind-Ramos, who also exhibited alongside Weber in Nottingham earlier this year.) These exhibitions are not, though, the outcomes of curatorial triangles. Building on the Pavilion’s 2023 survey of Hélio Oiticica, together, they present different, contemporary practices across South America, reflecting a sustained curatorial engagement and ever-deepening relationships, with creative contexts across the continent.
This struggle for ‘translation on the terms of the cultures from which they come’ is not shared by all. At the opening of these exhibitions, Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim, shared a racist remark thrown at their group for speaking Portuguese at the local Wetherspoons pub.
Some things simply resist being said in other languages. Alarcón herself is visibly moved by hearing themselves translated into English, never from Wichí, only via the colonial intermediate of Spanish. Only one interview (in Spanish) can be accessed online, from Alarcón & Silät’s inclusion in the 60th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in 2024. In Sussex, some works are framed and placed on white walls to be more typically perceived, understood, and valued. Others hang on a series of wooden struts, to be experienced from plural perspectives, backs too - a nod to Lina Bo Bardi’s suspension of artworks in ‘glass easels’, first conceived for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in Brazil in 1968, and reproduced in the Arsenale in Venice in 2024.
The loops and holes of the weavings - sometimes small, sometimes large - turn the central display into a series of semi-permeable screens, if not transparent. This installation is a subtle assertion of the rights to opacity and plurality, in a world where diverse identities and practices are still homogenised into the singular, capitalised category of ‘Indigenous art’*.
Titles like Wenachelamejen [Lo diferente / The Other] (2025), given to a work on view in a concurrent exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London, hint at Alarcón’s critical engagement with these hierarchies, both external and internal. In December 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman to be awarded a National Salon of Visual Arts prize by the Ministry of Culture in Argentina. Brunson remarks that their inclusion in Venice nevertheless remains the critical factor to their increased visibility in contemporary arts circles.
To what ends, for the artist, and their communities? Alarcón returns to language, and the meaning of Silät as ‘message’, ‘information’ or ‘alert’. Simultaneously with these solo exhibitions, the collective has participated in group exhibitions including the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil - an edition postponed following the 2024 flooding of Porto Alegre - and Arts of the Earth, to open at the Guggenheim Bilbao in December. Tapestry-making and embroidery can help communities achieve economic self-sufficiency, and are the sole income for many women across the region. This precarity is exacerbated by the entangled threats of cultural erasure and the climate crisis. (Such concerns are also indirectly referenced in the electrical weavings of Elias Sime, another of the James Cohan community to display at Venice and, closer to home, Hastings Contemporary.)
Silät work within the only territory to have ever taken the Argentine government to the Hague in defence of human rights, a case in which arts played a vital role. Fernández, one of the first white women to visit their communities, suggests that their practice is not only a refuge but, again, of translation, from political activism ‘into the language of art.’
Of all the words here, the most important is Wichí, which simply means 'person'. This careful exhibition reminds us of the human nature of making - the unbroken thread.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Tayhin is on view at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 September 2025.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät: Choreography of the Imagination is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London until 25 July 2025.
*’Tate's new Indigenous art fund taps into theme of Venice Biennale’, ‘It’s not a bubble’: Indigenous art comes to London after post-Venice backlash’, and ‘How Indigenous art became in demand’ (which references Alarcón & Silät’s exhibitions) are some examples published in mainstream arts publications in the year since the Biennale in 2024.
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