Revealing (In)visible Times: Exhibition Symposium (Open Cambridge 2025)

The Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge, is pleased to present Revealing (In)visible Times, a two-person exhibition featuring Brazilian-born artist Alexandre da Cunha and Chilean artist Francisca Aninat, curated by Valentina Gajardo. Through installation, textiles, and reconfigured found objects, the exhibition explores the experience of waiting, inertia, and overlooked durations in the daily lives of often unseen, or transient, communities.

The exhibition forms part of the Visual Enquiries exhibitions programme at The Heong Gallery, which aims to foster dialogue between academic research and the visual arts. This public interdisciplinary symposium accompanies the exhibition, featuring contributions from scholars at the University of Cambridge. Sessions will explore contemporary experiences of liminality, displacement, and invisible routines—extending the exhibition’s questions into wider cultural and political contexts. The exhibition and symposium are part of the Open Cambridge 2025 programme.

About the exhibition:

At the heart of Revealing (In)visible Times is a shared inquiry into how time materialises – how it can linger in the fibers of everyday objects and places, from hospital waiting rooms to cleaning equipment. The physical hosts of ‘lost’ passages of time are transformed into artworks that foreground hidden narratives of care, displacement, and labour.

Alexandre da Cunha reimagines found materials—such as mop heads and ropes—in sculptural works like Freefall II, Vortex (Brown Eye), and Kentucky (Partridge). These ordinary materials bear unseen histories, and the resultant artworks are marked by the lingering traces of use and repetition. Much of da Cunha’s practice illuminates the quiet dignity embedded in manual labour and the materials it relies on.

Francisca Aninat’s contributions include her South American Series and a new body of work created through collaborative workshops with patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. Her work meditates on the vulnerability of healthcare systems in Chile and the UK, staging a material dialogue between distant hospitals and shared experiences of waiting, anxiety, and care. Through textile assemblage and collective making, Aninat offers a poetics of silent time—of hours suspended in hospital waiting rooms, stitched into fabric and held in gesture.

Together, da Cunha and Aninat offer parallel strategies for perceiving time less as a linear flow than as a material condition: something to be handled, layered, and revealed. Their works pose quiet but urgent questions: What does time leave behind? How do materials remember?

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME:

14:00 = Registration

14:30 = Session 1: (In)visible Places and Times

Chaired by Dr Lorna Dillon

Speakers:

Dr Carlos Fonseca (writer and academic)

After Catastrophe: The Caribbean Archives as site of Survival

Dr Anna Corrigan (Teaching Associate in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge)

Waiting as Formal and Political Strategy in Three Works of Correspondence Art from Argentina and Chile

This session brings together inquiries into how artists and writers have staged temporality as both a formal device and a political act. From the postal delays that shaped correspondence art in Argentina and Chile under dictatorship, to the spectral archives of the Caribbean after catastrophe, the works examined in this session trace how waiting, latency, and survival are materially inscribed in artistic practice. Across distant geographies, the artworks engage the gaps—moments when the present is suspended, the past unsettled, and the future not yet arrived—as spaces for contemplation, fugitivity, and the cultivation of new political imaginaries.

15:10 = Session 2: (Inter)medial Dialogues

Chaired by Dr Rachel Coombes

Speakers:

Dr Liesbeth François (Lorna Close Lecturer and Fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge)

Upset in Stone: Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Centón pétreo

Dr Ewan Campbell (Director of Music at Churchill and Murray Edwards Colleges in Cambridge)

Music notation in the wild

Session 2 brings together works that unsettle the seeming stability of representational systems—musical notation, cartography, poetic form, and geological material—by forcing them into unexpected encounters. Dr François turns to Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Centón pétreo, a poetic installation in volcanic stone that reframes women’s voices from antiquity through a tactile, geological lens, activating feminist, transhistorical, and multisensory modes of reading. Dr Campbell's presentation reimagines the European stave, fracturing its linearity and allowing musical fragments to wander across maps, topographies, and even melting icebergs, prompting new resonances between sound, place, and meaning.

16:00 = Coffee break

16:20 = Session 3: (Inter)woven Borders

Chaired by Curator Valentina Gajardo

Speakers:

Dr Amy Tobin (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and Curator, contemporary programmes at Kettle’s Yard)

“The search for a structure in society is […] the search I undertake for form in my paintings”: Cecilia Vicuña’s political formations

Haotian (Walden) Wu (PhD student in Film and Screen Studies at Queens College, University of Cambridge)

For the Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke, 2015) and the hills be removed…

Rosie O’Donovan (Arts Programme Manager at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge)

This final session gathers reflections on how artistic and cinematic forms braid together histories, geographies, and commitments that cross political and cultural boundaries. Examining Cecilia Vicuña’s cross-media practice and the contemporary Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart Together respectively, these papers invite us to consider how memory, form, and fidelity weave through ruptured times and spaces, creating constellations of belonging that resist erasure.

17:00 = Reflection and Q&A

17:30 = Exhibition viewing and drinks in The Heong Gallery