Name/Title
Read thread : the story of the red threadEntry/Object ID
N9500.V53.R4Description
Catalog of an exhibition held at Documenta 14, Athens, Greece, April 8-July 16, 2017. From the 1970s to the present, Cecilia Vicuña's work has both visually and poetically engaged with rituals from Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe, and pre-Columbian America that involve red-colored thread. The Chilean artist's performances, site-specific installations, paintings, and drawings relate to the symbolic function of textile and language as well as the ritual dimension of menstrual blood in the construction of solidarity through femininity and maternity, to support and continue life. "Read Thread" tells the story of the sanguine thread in Vicuña's work. A tension arises in the asymmetry of Andean weaving and the artist's quipus large-scale immersive installations of thread, wool, and yarn that reference the pre-Columbian language of knotting, a type of weaving-as-writing. Vicuña's translation of the quipu into a spatial and performative poetics conveys the tension of ecological disaster and reparation as well as a bodily sense of the cosmic scale of landscape, history, and time. Alongside documentation of Vicuña's quipus, this publication includes hybrid compositions poetic texts and narratives written by the artist especially for this project, often relating the works to their political and historical context.Lexicon
Search Terms
artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, feminism in art, red, women artists, women in artLegacy Lexicon
Category
Exhibition catalogBook Details
Author
Cecilia Vicuña, Dieter Roelstraete, é de Nordenflycht ConchaPublisher
Sternberg PressDate Published
2017Call No.
N9500.V53.R4ISBN
3956793226, 9783956793226Notes
Length: 144