Page 57 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

and unspun wool sometimes combined with found
objects. The khipu (knot) was knotting made of colored
threads to convey complex narrative and numerical
information, a system created in the Andes in South
America and later abolished by European colonizers.
Vicuña reimagines her Quipus as a poetic response
against cultural, ecological, and economic disparities.
As part of this exhibition, the artist will premiere a
three-part Quipu, Quipu del exterminio / Extermination
Quipu (2022), installation representing life, death, and
resurrection as a call to action to stop the extinction
of earth’s species and the loss of biocultural
diversity. The artist’s “living” Quipu performance is a
participatory collective healing ceremony connecting
ancient memory and contemporary culture, inviting
visitors to become active in the poetic and political
change of our world.
This exhibition is organized by Pablo León de la
Cecilia Vicuña, Autobiografía (Autobiography), 1971. Oil on canvas, 23 1/2
Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America, Solomon R.
× 25 1/4 in. (59.7 × 64.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San
Diego, Museum purchase, Elizabeth W. Russell Foundation Fund, 2019. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Geaninne
Photo: Matthew Herrmann, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Associate Curator, Guggenheim
York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. © Cecilia Vicuña
Museum Bilbao, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and
Foundation.
as a young student in Chile. Long anticipated, this
is the first solo exhibition of Vicuña’s work in a New Cecilia Vicuña, La mulata costeña de Colombia (The Mulata Costeña of
York museum and will bring renewed and overdue Colombia), ca. 1977. Oil on canvas, 47 × 39 1/4 in. (119.4 × 99.7 cm).
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul,
national and international attention to a pioneering
and London. Photo: Matthew Herrmann, courtesy the artist and Lehmann
contemporary Latin American artist. Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. © Cecilia Vicuñ
Vicuña explores themes of memory, language, science,
and Indigenous spirituality and knowledge across
her practice. Her early figurative paintings in this
exhibition were conceived as a decolonizing act
to subvert the oil tradition imposed on Indigenous
culture by the European conquest. These works
interweave her biography with the story of the rise
of socialism. Following the 1973 Chilean military
coup that ushered in the dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet, Vicuña self-exiled in London and the political
activism of her art intensified, revolutionary icons
and influences - ranging from Karl Marx, Chilean folk
singer and social activist Violeta Parra, and Andean
popular art, animism, and Indigeneity, which had long
been her subjects - became poignant symbols of
what was under attack. Also, on view in textiles, film,
and works on paper will be Vicuña’s language-based
Palabrarmas, or “word weapons,” which are politically
engaged, metaphorical riddles and poems displaying
her conception of language as a living entity.
In the mid-1960s Vicuña began her Quipu series, soft
sculptures made of suspended strands of knotted

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