When her UK visa expired in 1975, she went to Bogot\u00e1, Colombia, then moved to New York in 1980 where she has remained to the present. It was not until recently that Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s outstanding contributions have been commercially recognised. She received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement award<\/a> at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and won the Icon Artist Gold Medal<\/a> at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025. <\/p>\n Her new solo exhibition Living Threads<\/a> contributes to the long-overdue recognition this engaging and important artist deserves.<\/p>\n The \u201cliving threads\u201d of the exhibition title tell of Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s ideas around the vitality and effervescence within fibre-based art practice, as well as the invisible connections and interactions between people and plants, animals and the natural world. These ideas have occupied Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s creativity since her teenage years and are magnificently displayed at Whitechapel. <\/p>\n Upon entering the first gallery space, visitors are presented with a room-filling vision of Quipu Menstrual 1 (unknotted)<\/a> (2006-24). Streams of raw wool in deep reds, vibrant oranges and soft pinks hang in structured rows. While some strands drape all the way to the floor, others trail off at barely a third of that length, appearing torn and frayed under their own weight. Through its monumental scale, the work directly challenges western ideals of permanence and memorialisation traditionally found in stone statues and monuments.<\/p>\n While stood immobile in front of this enormous installation, there is subtle yet constant movement where the airflow within the gallery drags across the materials. It causes a gentle sway reminiscent of branches in a breeze. <\/p>\n As visitors move around the vast form of Quipu Menstrual, their presence stirs the raw wool into a gentle dance. This motion creates a deep connection between the viewer and the artwork, entangling human hair and airborne fibres with the physical piece. Through these subtle interactions, the porous, shifting material transforms the viewer into an active participant. Energised by these living threads, the work appears to breathe alongside the surrounding room.<\/p>\n Contributing to themes of liveliness within these traditionally inert materials are Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s ideas surrounding the \u201cnot yet\u201d. This open-ended phrase points toward notions of becoming and transformation. <\/p>\n Vicu\u00f1a views existence as an ongoing process, rather than something fixed or finite. Swaying, mobile and fragile, her installations are literally untethered, resisting the urge to impose rigid meaning and leaving room for pure possibility. Through the \u201cnot yet\u201d of Quipu Menstrual, Vicu\u00f1a surrenders control, passing the work\u2019s ongoing life over to the piece itself and the participating viewer.<\/p>\n Gallery three comprehensively introduces visitors to Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s vital role in Artist\u2019s for Democracy (AFD). Vicu\u00f1a was a founding member of this London-based artist group (alongside Guy Brett, John Dugger and David Medalla) which raised awareness within the arts and wider community of the plight of the Chilean people and other liberation and human rights struggles worldwide. <\/p>\n In existing literature, Vicu\u00f1a has been cast in more of a supporting role in the formation of AFD, so it is refreshing that Whitechapel are championing her pivotal position as founding member. <\/p>\n There is photographic documentation of a smiling enthusiastic Vicu\u00f1a in a 1974 exhibition showing her Objects for the Chilean Resistance, 1973-74. This series of objects highlights her focus on the overlooked and discarded within daily life revealing an intense desire for equality. The prolifically produced objects point towards an anxiety at being far from home during that politically unstable period of extreme and violent displays of power and forceful suppression.<\/p>\n The exhibition showcases the breadth of Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s multidisciplinary practice. It features a dedicated gallery for her surrealist-inflected paintings. These works are modern recreations of early canvasses lost or destroyed during her decades of exile and displacement between London, Colombia and New York. <\/p>\n The exhibition shows that Vicu\u00f1a mourns the loss of these early paintings. But their rebirth here aligns beautifully with her belief in cyclic time and invisible threads of connections. There is a coherence here where dissolution becomes a creative catalyst rather than a destructive force.<\/p>\n Whitechapel completes the weaving in and out of our journey through Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s career by presenting the work Foraging Quipu<\/a> (2025-26). This piece encapsulates Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s desire for communal engagement, transformation and viewer participation by requesting that the public contribute items that they have encountered within their daily routine. <\/p>\n Principally composed of natural and biological matter, Foraging Quipu is constantly decomposing and changing. Moving bodies around the work and the natural passage of time mean that Foraging Quipu will provide a different experience upon each look, illustrating some of Vicu\u00f1a\u2019s ideas about relationality and invisible living threads.<\/p>\nA gentle dance with living threads<\/h2>\n
Invisible threads of connection<\/h2>\n
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