iWhitechapel GalleryWhitechapel
Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads
The first major UK survey of the Chilean artist, poet and activist, spanning six decades of work that dissolves boundaries between art, poetry, performance and ritual. Includes a companion participatory installation, Foraging Quipu.
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You start in the first room with Quipu Menstrual: a dense mass of unspun wool, vivid red and brown, hanging from the ceiling. The quipu is the Andean knotted-cord record, and Vicuña has been making her own versions for decades.
The show fills Galleries 1, 2 and 3 and covers six decades. Vicuña came to London in 1972 to study at the Slade, kept a studio in Stepney Green, and stayed in exile after the 1973 coup in Chile. Her 1970s paintings are here, made on a stated policy "to be a bad painter". So is a room on Artists for Democracy, the group she co-founded in London in 1974, with documents never shown before. Of the fragile precarios she made in London, one survives, shown beside records of 400 that were lost.
It suits anyone who wants the archive as much as the wool. Tickets are £16.50, £9.50 concessions, and it is open until 9pm on Thursdays. Foraging Quipu, the participatory piece in Gallery 4, is free.
Look for
Quipu Menstrual 1 (unknotted)
Look up in the first room: unspun wool in vivid shades of red and brown, suspended from the ceiling in a dense mass.
Jaguar II
An oil painting of a muscular figure that is half human, half big cat, hung in the room titled "Pain Things".
Llaverito (Blue Lady)
A bright orange hybrid of a woman and a crustacean, holding a bunch of keys.
The last London precario
The only survivor of the small, fragile sculptures she made from found scraps in London, shown with documentation of the 400 that were lost.
What is Poetry to You? (1980)
A short film shot in Bogotá in which Vicuña puts the title question to people she meets, one at a time.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Nerding Out
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Image credits
7
- Cecilia Vicuña: Living ThreadsCourtesy of Whitechapel Gallery
- Yuko Mohri: In ConcertCourtesy of Barbican Centre
- Robert Ryman: The Real ThingCourtesy of Barbican Centre
- RootsCourtesy of The Photographers' Gallery
- Whitechapel GalleryGrindtXX / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Tower of LondonBob Collowan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Barbican CentreJulian Herzog / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0