Revealing (In)visible Times: Alexandre da Cunha & Francisca Aninat

11 Sep-19 Oct 2025

Overview

Revealing (In)visible Times is 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.

At the heart of the exhibition 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 Free Fall 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 America 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?

Press

Revealing (In)visible Times: Alexandre da Cunha & Francisca Aninat press release
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