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Cecilia Vicuña

born 1948

Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens) 2017
© reserved
In Tate Britain

Modern and Contemporary British Art

Biography

Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.

Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which her fibre art quipus, knotted or unknotted strings, palabrarmas and precarios, made from natural, delicate materials, stand out. Her practice has been specifically linked to the term eco-feminism.

Cecilia Vicuña was distinguished with Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas 2019, Spain's most prominent art award and given out by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to an artist based in the country or from the Ibero-American Community of Nations. The jury statement said that she is receiving the award for her "outstanding work as a poet, visual artist and activist" and her "multidimensional art that interacts with the earth, written language, and weaving.". The same year she was an invited guest artists to the physics laboratory CERN.

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Artworks

  • Precarios: A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance

    Cecilia Vicuña
    1973–4
  • Violeta Parra

    Cecilia Vicuña
    1973
    On display at Tate Britain part of Modern and Contemporary British Art
  • Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens)

    Cecilia Vicuña
    2017

Film and audio

  • Look Closer

    Cecilia Vicuña's Brain Forest Quipu: Calls-to-action

    Miranda Samuels

  • Interview

    Cecilia Vicuña - 'Your Rage is Your Gold'

Features

  • Exhibition Guide

    Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuña: Brain Forest Quipu

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