Artist Talk: Cecilia Vicuna & Catherine de Zegher (EN)
Artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña joins curator and writer Catherine de Zegher for a conversation on her contribution to the exhibition Magical Realism. Vicuña’s multifaceted practice brings together ritual, ecology, and ancestral knowledge to reflect on the interconnectedness of all life.
Together, they will explore how her ephemeral work resists extractivist systems and offers alternative ways of sensing, remembering, and engaging with the world. Grounded in feminist and Indigenous cosmologies, the conversation invites us to imagine more relational and caring approaches to art, history, and the environment.
Image credit: Jason Schmidt
Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Chile) is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker and activist based in New York. Her poetic work in space, performance and visual arts is considered a decolonising vision that anticipates ecofeminism. In recent years, Vicuña has exhibited at the Toronto Biennial (2024); Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2024); Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2022); and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022). Her retrospective Soñar el agua was on view at the Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2024); MALBA, Buenos Aires (2023); and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2023). In February 2023, she was elected honorary foreign member of the Academy of Arts and Letters of the United States and was granted a doctorate honoris causa by the Universidad de Chile. She was awarded MOCA, Los Angeles’s inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize (2024) and won the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (2023).
A member of the Royal Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, Catherine de Zegher was the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. Before that position, she was the Artistic Director of the 18th Biennale of Sydney and the 5th Moscow Biennale. At the Venice Biennale, she curated both the Australian and Belgian Pavilions. She organised the large-scale exhibition On Line in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. For many years, she was the Director of The Drawing Center in New York. Before she took up her career in North America, she was the Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Belgium. She is the curator of many acclaimed historical and contemporary exhibitions, such as America: Bride of the Sun. 500 Years of Latin America and the Low Countries and Inside the Visible. An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine; and the author and editor of numerous books, the most recent one, Women’s Work Is Never Done, an anthology of her essays on the work of women artists.