Pulling At The Threads of Cecilia Vicuña’s Life and Art
A Review of Whitechapel Gallery’s Living Threads Exhibition
By Lucy Tappin
Chilean artist and performer Cecilia Vicuña situates her work in the ‘not yet, the future potential of the unformed.’Power is found in liminality and transition; to be static is to be contained. Her Living Threads exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery celebrates this sentiment. It reads like poetry, weaving together indigenous tradition and political activism through cloth and paint. You are presented with a tapestry of her life and craft; a rich archive of protest, performance and painting. Despite employing a range of mediums, a thematic current runs through her work: Defiance. And the denial of categorisations of time, power and language. Vicuna’s work is both equivocal and revolutionary; it disrupts imperial chronologies and revives indigenous traditions all at once.
The first installation in Living Threads is a monumental display of hanging thread. Spanning the entire room, thick strands of dyed fibre fall from the ceiling in a cascade. This piece, Quipu Menstrual 1, utilises the material from one of Vicuña’s previous performances at the foot of a glacier in Chile’s El Plomo mountains. She draws parallels between melting ice and menstrual blood; both are vital yet under siege. This opening piece embodies Vicuña’s style and method, linking ecology, politics and the body in one art form. These threads echo the ancient Andean communication system, ‘quipu,’ which conveyed knowledge such as trade, statistics, and astronomy through knotted fibres. By employing this indigenous medium at scale to communicate political and ecological issues, she thrusts it, and the culture it represents, into the present. This, then, embodies Vicuna’s agenda as an artist: To revive practices that have been suppressed by political systems and insist on their contemporary relevance and vitality.
Vicuña’s instrumental use of colour manifests in her series Palabrarmas. The title combines Spanish words ‘palabras’ and ‘armas’, which translate to ‘words’ and ‘weapons’ respectively. Her play on words constitutes a form of political resistance and social commentary, and demonstrates the potential for language to construct and rupture regimes of violence. Having fled Pinochet’s dictatorial regime in the 70s, Vicuña used art to break apart and reconstruct words, imbuing them with new meaning. They constitute a form of nonviolent resistance to a regime intent on the monopolisation and silencing of dissenting voices. Like other pieces in the exhibition, her Palabramas defy categorisation; undeniably hopeful in their vibrant colour yet overshadowed by their bleak subject matter. Bright red, blue and yellow hands gather together to resemble the shape of a gun. Words are torn in two, left disfigured. The palabrarmas use violent imagery to insist on nonviolence.
It is Vicuña’s paintings that, for me, truly exemplify her power as an artist, poet and activist. They are works of motion and metamorphosis; canvases scattered with bodies, animals, plants, instruments, eyes, hands. She draws on the colonial artistic tradition of the Cusco School and shamanic ritual of ancient Andean culture, placing opposed aesthetics and authorities next to each other. Despite championing indigenous people and livelihoods, these paintings seemed surreal to me. Bodies configured in strange ways and distorted in scale. But this confusion reminded me of Vicuña’s statement that potential can be found in the ‘unformed.’ Surely this applies to the unconventionally formed too. Ultimately these pieces are forms of playful subversion that demand us to reimagine how the body can push political and social boundaries.
There is a small plaque at the beginning of the exhibition that discusses ‘arte Precario.’ The process of collecting fragile ephemera or discarded material and turning them into something functional or even sacred. Traces of this art form, coined by Vicuña, can be found throughout Living Threads. Material of the past is restored to the present in vibrant confusion. Indigenous tradition and language suppressed by European colonisation is revived in her ‘quipo.’ Voices of political dissent under Pinochet’s dictatorship are amplified in her ‘palabrarmas.’ Living Threads is a gift. An invitation to challenge political dogma and celebrate ambiguity in all its colourful forms.
Works Cited
“Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads - Whitechapel Gallery.” Whitechapel Gallery, 9 Nov. 2026, https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/cecilia-vicuna/.
Khomami, Nadia. “‘My Poetry Won Me Asylum’: Cecilia Vicuña on Exile Life in ‘Sad’ Britain after Pinochet’s Coup.” The Guardian, The Guardian, 6 Oct. 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/oct/06/chile-asylum-cecilia-vicuna-pinochets-coup.
Nolan, Megan, and Published Nov 26 2025 0 Print this page. “Cecilia Vicuña Lost Her Precious Paintings in Exile — and Learned to Begin Again.” FinancialTimes, Financial Times, 26 Nov. 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/5b631217-bbd1-4be9-bb2e-65905cee96d2.
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