A new group exhibition bringing together three Central American artists opens at Elizabeth Xi Bauer gallery in Exmouth Market, London, on 21st August 2026, running until 27th September. Our Place in These Worlds, featuring works by Esvin Alarcón Lam, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín, and Simón Vega, is a touring artist-led project that interrogates Eurocentric ideas of belonging and engages with histories of colonisation and migration while resisting fixed notions of identity.
The exhibition is curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes and has been conceived as a non-hierarchical, collective endeavour, with the ongoing dialogue between the three artists forming its underlying conceptual framework. A private view takes place on Thursday 20th August from 6pm to 8pm at the gallery’s premises at 20–22 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE. The gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 6pm, or by appointment.
A Touring Project With Evolving Perspectives
The project has a history stretching back to 2023, when it was first presented at Sol del Río Gallery in Guatemala City. A second iteration followed at Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas in 2025. While some works have been part of the project since its inception, others are shown for the first time at Elizabeth Xi Bauer. The London presentation marks a further evolution through the introduction of de Pontes’s curatorial perspective, and includes a newly commissioned conversation between the three artists and the curator. The exhibition also incorporates a curatorial essay by María Jacinta Xón Riquiac, a Maya K’iche’ anthropologist and Indigenous rights activist, lending additional scholarly grounding to a show that engages directly with questions of Indigenous knowledge and postcolonial identity.
In an era of heightened debate around migration, cultural belonging, and political polarisation, the exhibition positions itself as an advocate for more nuanced, relational approaches to selfhood and community. It considers how dominant ideologies shape the ways in which worlds — and the lives within them — are imagined, and resists the exoticisation that can accompany exhibitions presenting work from non-Western or Indigenous contexts.
The Artists and Their Practices
Esvin Alarcón Lam, born in Guatemala City in 1988, works across performance, video, textile, and sculpture to examine mobility and cultural inheritance. A recurring focus of his practice is the Chinese diaspora in Central America, which he explores through the story of his maternal grandfather. His work traces how symbols and motifs circulate and accumulate layered meaning as they move across geographies and generations. Alarcón Lam has exhibited at institutions including MoMA PS1 in New York and Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, and was an artist-in-residence at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme between 2023 and 2024. The Elizabeth Xi Bauer presentation will be his first showing of works in the United Kingdom.
Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín, born in 1982 in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, draws on his Tz’utujil Maya heritage to create textile-based works rooted in Indigenous epistemologies and craft traditions. His practice treats woven structures as living systems that encode cosmological knowledge and relationships with land and community. He has presented work at Tate Modern as part of the 2022 exhibition Inherited Threads, and was included in the Barbican Centre’s major travelling exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art in 2024. His work is held in collections including the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art in New York. New textile-based works will be presented as part of the London exhibition.
Simón Vega’s practice employs sculpture, installation, and drawing to reflect on postcolonial conditions and the ways in which futures are imagined from the margins of global power structures. His installations bring together everyday materials and DIY technologies with references that are at once playful and critical, using humour alongside pointed commentary to interrogate ideas of progress and aspiration. He will contribute a site-specific installation to the Elizabeth Xi Bauer exhibition.
Elizabeth Xi Bauer and the London Context
Elizabeth Xi Bauer is a contemporary art gallery based in Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell — an area that has become one of central London’s more active hubs for independent galleries and design-led businesses. The gallery has previously shown Pichillá Quiacaín’s work in a solo capacity, with his 2023 exhibition In front of the lake marking his first solo show in Europe. Our Place in These Worlds builds on that relationship and places the gallery within a broader conversation happening across London’s contemporary art institutions about how to present and contextualise work from Latin American, Indigenous, and diasporic artists.
The private view on 20th August is open to the public, and the exhibition runs until 27th September 2026. Further details are available via the gallery’s press office.
