“MY WORK DWELLS ON THE NOT YET,” writes the Chilean artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña. From her early ephemeral “precarios” made in Chile—many never documented—to the monumental Disappeared Quipu, 2018, at New York’s Brooklyn Museum, Vicuña places Indigenous knowledge systems and what she calls “ancient spiritual technologies” in dialogue with artistic strategies more familiar to the modern avant-garde to confront ecological catastrophe, patriarchal capitalism, and cultural homogenization.
Vicuña’s art has recently received a wave of institutional attention, most notably in the form of “About to Happen,” a traveling retrospective organized by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Andrea Andersson. On the occasion of a recently opened retrospective at Madrid’s Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo and a string of presentations in China and South Korea—at the Shanghai Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale, and Lehmann Maupin in Seoul—the artist has prepared a special portfolio for Artforum, featuring paintings, drawings, and poetry, with a focus on works from the beginning of her career.
Thirsty
You think you are thirsty?
Think again
Your thirst is zero compared to the thirst
of the ancestors
the thirst
of those who have disappeared
those who have been
forgotten
Cecilia Vicuña
Shame performance
Museo de las Americas, Denver, 2005
