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 = (In)visible Places and Times Speakers: Dr Carlos Fonseca and Dr Anna CorriganSession 1 explores the notion of temporality and suspended symptoms inscribed in Latin American art and literature, addressing both microhistories and historical events, aiming to reconfigure traces, resonances, silenced narratives and points of reference from an aesthetic perspective.

15:10 = (Inter)medial DialoguesSpeakers: Dr Ewan Campbell and Dr Liesbeth FrançoisSession 2 examines the porous passage of ‘symptoms and narratives’, approached from interdisciplinary perspectives. This session aims to engage with the resonant threshold that touches the emotional vibrancy of places and times in the present, while also exploring the silences of everyday life and the environment. It explores materiality, rhythms and gestures that emerge between knowledge and the unknown, visible and invisible traces.

16:00 = Coffee break

16:20 = (Inter)woven BordersSpeakers: Dr Amy Tobin, Dr Haotian (Walden) Wu and Rosie O'Donovan Session 3 seeks to reflect on the porous and symbolic confluence of heterogeneous and unbounded temporalities, aiming to investigate a common boundary where human and non-human relations mutually interact with the environment and the notion of dwelling. This session explores how time and space are deeply interwoven and co-affect each other in a continuous movement of being together.

17:00 = Reflection and Q&A

17:30 = Exhibition viewing in The Heong Gallery