Cecilia Vicuña Returns to London for First Major UK Show — SkimNews
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- Cecilia Vicuña arrived in London in 1973 on a British Council scholarship to the Slade School of Art; after Pinochet's September coup, her newly published poetry book Saborami was shown to Home Office judges, who granted her asylum — "It's really one of the main stories of my life," she says.
- Artists for Democracy, which she co-founded in 1974 with Guy Brett, David Medalla and John Dugger after an ICA discussion she crashed to protest artists being killed in Chile, is documented in a dedicated Whitechapel room with never-before-seen materials she says previous tellings left her out of.
- "Living Threads" brings together six decades of Vicuña's work across painting, textile, photography, installation and film, including the only surviving precario from her London years — a fragile form she began making in the 1960s as a response to an oil refinery built over an ancestral Chilean burial ground.
- Vicuña lost a trunk of 400 sculptures left with acquaintances during exile, which were eventually thrown away; she has recreated some from memory and photographs as what she calls not reconstruction but "reincarnation" — "the stories and images that want to live again."
- Brain Forest Quipu, her 2022 Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission of wool, knotted rope and Thames debris, received a five-star Guardian review called the most moving Turbine Hall commission in years; she has since won the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and a 2017 Guggenheim survey.
- Vicuña argues Britain was "the first country to acknowledge Pinochet as the new leader of Chile" yet also the place where "the defence of the law was powerful enough" to grant her asylum — and warns the same pattern is playing out with AI: "now AI has been trained to train itself, and as soon as that happens, it started to behave in a destructive way."
Why it matters: Vicuña operated under the radar for decades before her 2017 Documenta inclusion aged 69 — an event she says first acknowledged her work's meaning; her Whitechapel show at 78 is both a homecoming to the East End neighbourhood where she became an exile-activist and the rare six-decade survey of a Latin American artist whose quipu and precario practices, rooted in indigenous Andean knowledge and ecological resistance, have only recently entered mainstream Western museum discourse.
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