Chaveli Sifre
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1987
Puerto Rico
EMBAJADA
Puerto Rican artist, Chaveli Sifre, centers her work on healing practices, the sense of smell, botany, and the belief systems constructed around them. She creates installations, scents, paintings, and performative rituals that recover the long-lost intersections between science, spirituality, perfumery, medicine, magic, and care. Through her scent-based works, Sifre brings smells of the Caribbean into the exhibition space.
For Liste, Sifre presents a multi-media installation inspired by Botánicas, which are religious goods stores prevalent in Puerto Rico and across Latin America. These establishments offer an array of religious paraphernalia, medicinal herbs, and fragrances associated with luck, money, and love. They also provide services for spiritual cleansings (limpias) and divination.
As an integral part of this installation, Sifre will introduce a site-specific activation using steam distillation. This technique will be employed to extract the smell from donated money, coins retrieved from wishing wells, regional healing botanicals, and other aromatic elements. Small distillery equipment will be showcased prominently at the center of the booth, enabling the production of the scented fluid. The resulting liquid, harvested within the booth, will be contained in sculptural flasks. A collection of paintings referencing the process and ceramic sculptures reminiscent of ex-votos will be displayed alongside the installation.
Sifre's body of work delves into the cosmology of flora and botanical entities and the hierarchy of the senses, exploring how mechanisms of belief manifest as ritualized mediations toward desire.
Chaveli Sifre (b. 1987 Würzburg, Germany) received her MA from Museumskunde, HTW, Berlin, Germany (2021) and her BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico in San Juan (2010). Sifre has been exhibiting internationally with solo exhibitions at Embajada, San Juan (2023), El Sitio, Barcelona (2022), El Lobi, Suan Juan (2019), Mana Contemporary, Chicago (2017), La Estación Espacial, San Juan (2016), Roberto Paradise, San Juan (2013, 2011). Sifre has participated in numerous institutional groups shows including in TBA21’s Meandering, Cordova (2022); Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan (2021), Botanisches Garten, Berlin (2020); Salon Sophie Charlotte, Berlin (2020); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), San Juan (2020); Martin Gropius Bau (2018); Hamburger Bahnhof (2017); Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuale, Habana, Cuba (2017), and LACE, Los Angeles (2016). In December 2022, Sifre mounted a project at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), San Juan, curated by Marina Reyes Franco entitled AEROSOL, infusing the museum’s courtyard with a fine mist of scents.