For Frieze New York 2025, Proyectos Ultravioleta presents a booth that explores how contemporary artists honor cultural heritage through diverse and innovative practices.

At its center is Edgar Calel’s monumental embroidery, which transports viewers to Casa Kit Kit—his grandmother’s home in Chi Xot / San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. This space serves as a tactile link to community identity and as both a literal and conceptual home for the presentation.

Sheltered within it are works by Rosa Elena Curruchich and Paula Nicho—both from Calel’s hometown in the Maya Highlands—that offer layered perspectives on Maya Kaqchikel life, traditions, and philosophy, bridging historical and contemporary viewpoints. Hellen Ascoli deepens the dialogue through her rigorous textile-based practice, treating the body as a tool and weaving as a language. Her works reflect on translation, perception, and the spaces of ambiguity between them.

Johanna Unzueta’s drawings and the suspended textile works of Claudia Alarcón & Silät highlight natural materials and organic forms. Referencing sacred geometries and ancestral knowledge, their pieces reinforce themes of interconnectedness across the Southern Cone, particularly between Argentina and Chile.

Using sound, text, animation, and video, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s newest single-screen works probe fragmented pasts and examine how materiality and collective memory can confront contested narratives that blur historical fact and shape our understanding of the present.

Together, these artists open a dynamic conversation around heritage, displacement, identity, tradition, and materiality—reimagining ancestral knowledge through contemporary, multimedia practices.