Talk: Cecilia Vicuña in conversation with Amara Antilla

Please note: This event is free, but seating is limited. RSVP tickets will not be held after 6:30pm on the day of the event. Sold Out.

In conjunction with Judith Bernstein: Cabinet of Horrors, The Drawing Center is hosting three evenings of conversations by artist-curator pairings on December 12, 2017; January 16th and 17th, 2018. The program is realized thanks to the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX and is produced by Rosario Güiraldes, Assistant Curator.

Amara Antilla, Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, joins Cecilia Vicuña to discuss the aesthetics and politics of disappearance and surrender. They will also discuss her New York street performances and actions from the 1980s and 90s and her work in the 1970s in relation to the Chilean coup and international liberation movements, and how we might apply these strategies today.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist who lives and works in Chile and New York. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the military coup in the early 1970s. Combining ritual and assemblage, she creates multidimensional, ephemeral, participatory, and site-specific works and performance installations which she calls “lo precario” (the precarious), a bridge between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. In Chile she founded the legendary Tribu No in 1967, a group that created anonymous poetic actions. In 1974, exiled in London, she co-founded Artists for Democracy to oppose dictatorships in the Third World. She was appointed Messenger Lecturer 2015 at Cornell University, an honor bestowed on authors who contribute to the evolution of civilization. Her visual art has been exhibited at The Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London; The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; The Berkeley Art Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany, 2017. Her itinerant exhibitionCecilia Vicuña: About to Happen opened at the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans in March 2017 and will travel to various museums in the U.S. Vicuña has published twenty-five art and poetry books, includingAbout to Happen 2017;Read Thread, The Story of the Red Thread 2017; andKuntur Ko 2015. She co-editedThe Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, 500 years of Latin American Poetry 2009, and editedÜL: Four Mapuche Poets in 1997.Spit Temple, The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña 2012, was runner-up for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. HerSelected Poetry is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press, 2018.

Amara Antilla is Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she assisted on the retrospectives of Monir Farmanfarmaian (2015), V. S. Gaitonde (2014), and Lee Ufan (2011). She is also part of the curatorial team responsible for acquisitions and exhibitions focusing on contemporary art from Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Antilla has helped to coordinate performances at the museum with Paulo Bruscky, OPAVIVARA!, Amalia Pica, Public Movement, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Public Movement, and Slavs and Tatars. Independently she has organized programs in collaboration with Clark House Initiative, Mumbai; FD13; Northern Spark, Minneapolis; Videotage, Hong Kong; and N.K. Projekt, Berlin. Antilla was awarded an Asian Cultural Council grant for Art History (2015–16) and served as curatorial adviser for Rewind at the Dhaka Art Summit (2016). She studied Art History at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is currently pursuing graduate work in Art History at Hunter College at the City University of New York (CUNY).