World in My Eyes – Cecilia Vicuña

Photo: Bruno Savelli

Cecilia Vicuña, born in 1948, is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist from Santiago, Chile. The military coup against President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s forced her into exile, and she spent her first years in London, where she founded Artists for Democracy. She is a pioneer of conceptual art in Chile and foundational to recent developments in contemporary art in South America and beyond.

According to Vicuña, social change can occur if we treat consciousness as a form of art and art as a form of transformation. By combining traditional materials and techniques with modern aesthetics, she creates powerful works that engage with notions of time and history, land and fertility, as well as the ritualistic and the sacred. This is particularly expressed in her textile works, inspired by Chilean and Andean craft practices that she reinterprets for a contemporary context. Vicuña's engagement with quipu—a traditional Andean textile artifact used for record-keeping—demonstrates her deep commitment to preserving Indigenous forms of knowledge and activating them today.

In 2022, Vicuña was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale and featured in notable exhibitions such as "Brain Forest Quipu" at Tate Modern in London and "Spin Spin Triangulene" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her prolific career also includes significant awards like the Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts in 2019 and the Herb Alpert Award for the Arts, alongside numerous international exhibitions documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale.

Language: English
Price: 80 SEK (free admission for students)
Tickets: www.stadsmissionen.se/motesplats-mariatorget/kalendarium

World in My Eyes – An Artist Lecture Series

All the islands in the ocean
All the heavens in the motion
Let me show you the world in my eyes
// Depeche Mode (1990)

In its second season, the artist talk series World in My Eyes presents Jonathas de Andrade, Selma Selman, Salman Toor, and Cecilia Vicuña. Each artist contributes to both the discursive and formal hybridity of contemporary art at a moment of acute geopolitical volatility and increasing polarization.

Launched in 2023, World in My Eyes is an artist lecture series in Stockholm presented through a collaboration between Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design; Moderna Museet; and the Royal Institute of Art and hosted by Mötesplats Mariatorget. Its title drawn from the eponymous 1990s electronic music hit by English band Depeche Mode, the series aims to present artistic perspectives from a wide range of media that are changing the relationship between material processes and socio-political imagination.