The Whitechapel Gallery has opened the first major UK exhibition of Cecilia Vicuna, the Chilean artist, poet and activist whose six-decade practice has made thread, poetry and ritual into instruments of resistance. 'Cecilia Vicuna: Living Threads' opened on 7 October 2026 and runs through 14 February 2027 across the gallery's first three floors. For Vicuna the show is a homecoming of sorts. She studied at the Slade in London and went into exile in the city after the 1973 coup in Chile, and the exhibition brings together the suspended wool installation 'Quipu Menstrual', the sole surviving work from her fragile 'precarios' series, paintings from the 1970s, and previously unseen material from Artists for Democracy, the solidarity group she co-founded in London in 1974. The exhibition traces how Vicuna has used fibre and language to honour Indigenous knowledge and to resist political violence, moving between intimate small-scale works and room-filling installations of unspun wool. Her quipus, knotted and unknotted cords derived from Andean communication systems, anchor a practice that treats making as both memorial and protest. The Whitechapel show arrives as Vicuna's international standing has never been higher, following major presentations in Sao Paulo and elsewhere, and positions the East London gallery as the home of her long-delayed British institutional debut. Standard tickets are priced at 16.50 pounds, with the gallery keeping its Thursday late openings through the run. The presentation spans Galleries 1, 2 and 3, with standard tickets at 16.50 pounds and concessions at 9.50. For an artist who found refuge in London more than fifty years ago, the exhibition is both a survey and a return: the quipus at its centre descend from Andean knotted-cord communication systems, and their presence in a major London institution marks how far her once-marginal practice has travelled.