Dream the Water Exhibition

Cecilia Vicuña's work travels to Buenos Aires

After passing through Buenos Aires, the exhibition will also be presented at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, between May and September 2024.

On December 7, in the context of this exhibition, the Chilean ambassador to Argentina José Antonio Viera-Galló will present a decoration to Cecilia Vicuña. Meanwhile, at 6:00 p.m., a conversation will be held with live streaming. Then at 7 p.m., the exhibition will open.

Likewise, among the scheduled activities, there is the Quipu performance of encounter with the Río de la Plata, which will take place on December 9.

The name of the exhibition represents an invitation to change our relationship with the earth. “Without humidity there is no humanity,” the artist reminds us. Her creations are not only testimonies of the past but above all witnesses of an open future, just as this retrospective presents her work as an experience that is not definitive, but alive and in process.

The exhibition offers a reading of Vicuña's work from South America and reviews sixty years of his production, highlighting his links with Chile, Argentina, the Andes mountain range, pre-Columbian textile memory, feminist struggles and eroticism, as well as the demands for self-determination of indigenous communities.

Since the 1960s, Vicuña's visionary work has been dedicated to honoring the balance and reciprocity of the natural world, without attacking or violently intervening. Her work values the ritual, medicinal and healing dimension of art. Her cyclical understanding of the creative act is manifested in works that are actions projected into the future: they in turn invite new acts of collective creation.

Curated by Miguel A. López, the exhibition brings together nearly 200 works, including paintings, drawings, texts, serigraphs, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, object books, documents and sound performances carried out in different places in America and Europe . Dreaming of water updates Vicuña's commitment to popular struggles, respect for human rights, and the importance of opposing devastation in a broad sense.

Publication

On the occasion of the exhibition, Malba co-published with the National Museum of Fine Arts of Santiago de Chile, the Pinacoteca of São Paulo and the RM publishing house, the most complete monographic book dedicated to the work of Cecilia Vicuña to date.
Double Spanish and English edition, the publication reproduces more than 200 works and documentary material. It presents a text by curator and editor Miguel A. López in epistolary format – a letter addressed to the artist – as well as new essays by Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Catherine de Zegher and José de Nordenflycht. It also includes two texts by Vicuña about her drawings from the Palabrarmas project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, as well as a conversation between Vicuña, Marisol de la Cadena and Camila Marambio.