Gabriel Chaile
Born:
Argentina
Lives in:
Lisbon
Location
- White Bay Power Station
Gabriel Chaile works between the fields of anthropology, religion and art. His work is rooted in the Indigenous cultures of Northeast Argentina, aiming to reconstruct and continue the lineage of his culture by developing upon a theory that Chaile calls ‘the genealogy of form’. He refers to himself as a ‘communicator of images’, which he finds through contextual observations, acting as a visual anthropologist in the way Indigenous forms and materials have survived time and denote resistance, such as the clay oven or the common pot. Working frequently with natural elements such as adobe, mud and metal, Chaile weaves stories that readdress and revitalise the tales of his ancestors and his community, integrating the ritualistic and communal significance of food and public spaces into his practice.
Gabriel Chaile, Centro Cultural Ambulante (Mobile Cultural Center), 2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy of the artist © Gabriel Chaile, Studio Chaile, Marianne Boesky Gallery and ChertLüdde, Berlin. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography.
Gabriel Chaile, Centro Cultural Ambulante (Mobile Cultural Center), 2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy of the artist © Gabriel Chaile, Studio Chaile, Marianne Boesky Gallery and ChertLüdde, Berlin. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography.
Gabriel Chaile, Centro Cultural Ambulante (Mobile Cultural Center), 2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy of the artist © Gabriel Chaile, Studio Chaile, Marianne Boesky Gallery and ChertLüdde, Berlin. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography.
Gabriel Chaile
Born 1985, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina
Lives and works between Buenos Aires, Argentina and Lisbon, Portugal
Centro Cultural Ambulante (Mobile Cultural Center) 2026
adobe, bricks, metal structure
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Courtesy of the artist, Studio Chaile, Marianne Boesky Gallery and ChertLüdde, Berlin
Often employing materials, forms, and archetypal symbols associated with pre-Columbian cultures, Gabriel Chaile’s anthropomorphic ovens connect anthropological discourse with Indigenous histories and collective politics. Borrowing from the distinctive ceramics of the Condorhuasi-Alamito peoples (c. 400 BCE–CE 700, Catamarca, Argentina) Chaile’s sculptures collapse linear ideas of past and present as easily as they combine a working oven with artwork and ritual object.
Made with unfired adobe clay, each work is a testament to the communal significance of food in the artists’ Spanish, Afro-Arab, and Indigenous Candelarian heritage, as well as a monument to the endurance of self-sustaining or familial economies in Argentina. Able to be wheeled out and fired up as part of recurrent community activation throughout the Biennale of Sydney, Chaile’s sculptures sit on the edge of classification in much the same way non-Western knowledge is kept to the peripheries of both historical and future thinking. For Chaile this liminal space is ripe ground for creating.
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