September 21 – December 1
Futur.O [Futur.E] is an installation 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 Cecilia 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 Cecilia 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, Cecilia 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. The presentation is made possible with the generous support of the Michelle Koerner Family Foundation, Lehman Maupin, New York, Seoul and London, and the Women Leading Initiative.
Bio
Cecilia Vicuña (she/her) is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in l974. She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her poetry and Palabrarmas (word-weapons) stem from a deep enquiry into the roots of language. Her early work as a poet in the 60’s was simultaneously celebrated by avant-garde poetry magazines such as El Corno Emplumado, Mexico City (l961–1968), and censored and/or suppressed for many decades in Chile and Latin America.
Solo exhibitions of Vicuña’s work have been organized at a number of major institutions, including, most recently, the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2022); Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Bogotá, Colombia (2022); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid, Spain (2021); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2020); and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2020). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including in documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), and the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and is part of major museum collections around the world.
The author of more than 30 volumes of art and poetry published in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, her most recent books are: Deer Book, Radius, Santa Fe, 2024, PALABRARmas, USACH, Editorial de la Universidad de Santiago (2023); Word Weapons, Co-published by RITE Editions and Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2023); Libro Venado, Direcciones, Buenos Aires (2022); Sudor de Futuro, Altazor, Chile (2021); Cruz del Sur, Lumen Chile (2020), Minga del Cielo Oscuro, CCE, Chile (2020), and New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, edited and translated by Rosa Alcalá, Kelsey Street Press (2018), among many others.
Cecilia Vicuña was the winner of the 2023 Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas 2023, one of the most prestigious awards given by her homeland. Preceding this recognition, Vicuña was elected a foreign honorary member of the United States Academy of Arts and Letters and also received the Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2022 at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Location
- Accessibility
Collision Gallery
Accessible Entrance
Wheelchair Accessible
Washrooms available on Concourse Level in PATH Network
Building is AODA-compliant
Parking: If you require parking, Commerce Court has parking available just off of Wellington Street with the entrance being west of Yonge Street.
- Getting There
Collision Gallery
By subway: Exit at King Station which is directly connected to Commerce Court.
By streetcar: Take the 504 King Street streetcar and get off at the Bay St stop, on the north side of the building. Walk south on Bay St and turn left onto Wellington St W, with the building on your left.
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