Cecilia Vicuña
Toronto Biennial of Art: Precarious Joys
Various locations, Toronto, Canada
21 September—1 December 2024
The third edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art: Precarious Joys features works by over 55 artists which explore the emotional climate of our times, acknowledging vulnerability and grief while emphasising the importance of passion and beauty in driving social change. It offers 10 weeks of free contemporary art at 11 unique locations across Toronto.
Cecilia Vicuña presents two installations across two different venues in Toronto: Futur.O [Futur.E] at Collision Gallery and Quipu Girok (2021) at 32 Lisgar St and Park.
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.
Quipu Girok (2021) is a large-scale textile installation. The title combines ancient Andean language and Korean, loosely translating to Knot (quipu) Record (girok). Since the 1960s and 1970s, Cecilia has been featuring the quipu in her work – an ancient Andean record-keeping device used to convey both narrative and numerical information –, involving knotted strings made from camelid fibre or cotton. This textile technology was banned during European colonization of the region.