Cecilia Vicuña was 24 when she arrived in London on a British Council scholarship to study at the Slade School of Art in 1973. She had planned a brief stay. Then General Augusto Pinochet's military coup overthrew Chile's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, in September that year.
Vicuña found herself among a handful of Chilean students immediately expelled from their universities and ordered to leave Britain. At a Home Office hearing, her pro-bono lawyers argued she would be killed if she returned to Chile. They presented judges with her recently published art and poetry book, Saborami, which documented the aftermath of the coup. The judges granted her asylum.
Now, five decades later, Vicuña is returning to Britain with a politically charged retrospective. The artist grew to love the country where she was forced to build a life in exile.