Artes Mundi 10: Carolina Caycedo

20 Oct 2023-25 Feb 2024

Overview

With presenting partner the Bagri Foundation, Artes Mundi 10 (AM10), the UK’s leading biennial exhibition and international contemporary art prize, will for the first time present seven international contemporary visual artists across five venue partners in Wales for its tenth anniversary edition. Taking place from 20 October 2023 to 25 February 2024, the winner of the prestigious £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize – the UK’s largest contemporary art prize – will be announced during the exhibition run.

AM10 will see each artist present a major solo project, including new productions, unseen works and several UK premieres. Some artists are presenting across multiple venues, whilst every artist will have work at a location in Cardiff.

The artist-exhibition locations for AM10 are: Mounira Al Solh, Rushdi Anwar and Alia Farid at National Museum Cardiff (one of the Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales family of museums); Nguyễn Trinh Thi at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and Chapter, Cardiff; Taloi Havini at Mostyn, Llandudno and Chapter, Cardiff; Carolina Caycedo at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown and Chapter, Cardiff; and Naomi Rincón Gallardo at Chapter, Cardiff.

Nigel Prince, Director of Artes Mundi, said: “AM10 promises to be a stimulating and thoughtful series of presentations. Working with each artist and our venue partners, we are able to present a series of in-depth shows that collectively address issues surrounding land use, territory and displacement through histories of environmental change, conflict and enforced migration, conditions that that speak to us all today.”

As an important arbiter of cultural exchange between the UK and international communities, Artes Mundi has built a reputation for bringing together art by some of the most relevant artistic voices engaging with urgent topics of our time. Past editions have seen Artes Mundi work with artists at crucial stages of their careers, often being their first introduction to UK audiences, with many now established figures on the world stage, including Dineo Seshee Bopape, Prabhakar Pachpute, Ragnar Kjartansson, Theaster Gates, John Akomfrah, Teresa Margolles, Xu Bing, and Tania Bruguera.

Carolina Caycedo at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown and Chapter, Cardiff

Born UK to Colombian parents. Lives and works in USA.

Carolina Caycedo is a multidisciplinary artist known for her videos, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues.

At Oriel Davies in Newtown, Caycedo will present a series of existing and new works including the premiere of the video, Fuel to Fire (2023). This brings the viewer into a pagamento, an indigenous ecological and economic fundamental protocol, that maintains the flow and balance of life cycles on earth based on reciprocity. Also presented will be the related Fuel to Fire: Mineral Intensive (2022 – ongoing), new large-scale coloured pencil drawings from an ongoing series that focus on extraction practices and their impact on the land.

Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice – using embodied knowledge and indigenous and feminist frameworks she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity. In My Female Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018 to present), more than 100 portraits of female environmentalists from across the world, including women who took part in The Greenham Common march, are printed on a textile banner as part of the Genealogy of Struggle series that will sit alongside a selection of original Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp banners from Welsh collections.

Connecting to the works at Oriel Davies, Caycedo will present a new work from her multimedia project Be Dammed (2012 – ongoing) at Chapter in Cardiff. Installed in the lightbox above the building’s entrance, the large-scale image and text work examines the impact of hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects on communities and the environment.