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

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.

At the heart of ‘Revealing (In)visible Times’ is a shared inquiry into how time materialises – how it can linger in the fibres 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 — to reveal how ordinary materials bear unseen histories, marked by the lingering traces of use and repetition. Francisca Aninat’s contributions include a new body of work created through collaborative workshops with patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. 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?