Art Basel Awards Summit

The artist as visionary: Cecilia Vicuña in conversation with Elena Filipovic

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Cecilia Vicuña, Artist, New York and Santiago Elena Filipovic, Director, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
What can artists teach us about the world we live in? How do they not only imagine new realities, but bring them into being? Art Basel Awards Summit kicks off with an intimate conversation between the Chilean poet, activist, and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña and Elena Filipovic, Director of Kunstmuseum Basel. They explore Vicuña’s prescient sculptural and literary practice, as well as her deep commitment to ecofeminism and ancestral knowledge. Marked by radical poetics and political struggle, Vicuña’s life has also been profoundly shaped by exile. In this panel, she discusses the role art and artists can play in a moment of crisis and how they might help chart a new path.
This panel is part of an hour-long session exploring how artists are designing the future.
Nominated in the Icon Artist category, Cecilia Vicuña integrates practices of poetry, performance, conceptualism, and textile craft in response to pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago, she was exiled during the early 1970s after the violent military coup against President Salvador Allende. This sense of impermanence, and a desire to preserve and pay tribute to the Indigenous history and culture of Chile, have characterized her work throughout her career.
Elena Filipovic is the director of Kunstmuseum Basel and is a member of the Art Basel Awards Jury. From 2014 to 2024, she served as director and curator of Kunsthalle Basel and prior to that, she served as senior curator of WIELS contemporary art center, Brussels. She was the curator of the Croatian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2022 and was co-curator, with Adam Szymczyk, of the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2008. She writes widely about art, has edited several compendiums on exhibition histories, and is the author of David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale (Afterall Books, 2017) and The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2016). Filipovic holds a PhD in art history from Princeton University.

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