Cecilia Vicuña
Futur.O [Futur.E]
Collision Gallery, Toronto, Canada
21 September—1 December 2024
The Toronto Biennial of Art’s mission is to make contemporary art accessible to everyone. A ten-week event every two years, the Biennial commissions artists to create new works for a city-wide exhibition in dialogue with Toronto’s diverse local contexts.
Futur.O [Futur.E] is an installation by Cecilia Vicuña that features both existing and new works. The piece is an homage to Gail Kastner, an eighteen-year-old Canadian girl who endured 64 electroshocks and the forced ingestion of drugs to erase her memory. According to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), Kastner left her testimony on written cigarette boxes. The installation consists of four distinct elements:
A Change of Consciousness (1973-2024) is a new version of a handmade artist book originally created by Vicuña from an empty cigarette box found in London. This new book consists of only one page, which bears the inscription in Spanish: “Ya no necesitamos cambio de conciencia individual solamente, sino un cambio de conciencia social” (We no longer need only a change in individual consciousness, but a change in social consciousness.)
12 Books for the Chilean Resistance (2013) is a video presenting all the twelve handmade artist books crafted by the artist using discarded objects found on the streets of London in 1973. The books were a symbolic call for artists and cultural workers to come together in a collective effort to defend the Chilean democratic socialist revolution of Salvador Allende.
Mind Control (2024) comprises six new drawings and collages. The pieces explore the impact of mind manipulation, specifically focusing on how misinformation and deceit can erode democracy. They address Kastner’s testimony regarding the forced psychotherapy experiments she underwent and Cecilia’s 1973 handmade book created against the attempts of a military coup in Chile. The artwork also delves into the contemporary issue of social media’s influence on young people’s minds, likening it to a modern-day form of “experimentation” disguised as “free choice.”
Imagino [I Imagine] (2024) is a poem in Spanish on a rice paper scroll. It reads: “Imagino una obra futura” (I imagine a future work). Created with pencil on two pieces of handmade paper, Vicuña reclaims the power of handwriting to dream about the future in a digital era where screens and virtual communication have almost made it extinct.
The exhibition includes a new iteration of a work conceived in 2009 and exhibited for the first time at the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art.