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Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian-born
visual artist The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics (art), ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual a ...
and
sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...
."Doris Salcedo"
Art 21, Retrieved 15 November 2018.
Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia and is generally composed of commonplace items such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, and rose petals. Salcedo's work gives form to pain, trauma, and loss, while creating space for individual and collective mourning. These themes stem from her own personal history. Members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in politically troubled Colombia. Much of her work deals with the fact that, while the death of a loved one can be mourned, their disappearance leaves an unbearable emptiness. Salcedo lives and works in
Bogotá Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish Imperial period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city, capital and largest city ...
,
Colombia Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...
.


Early life and education

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in
Bogotá Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish Imperial period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city, capital and largest city ...
,
Colombia Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...
. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at
Jorge Tadeo Lozano University Jorge Tadeo Lozano University is a private university whose main campus is located in Bogotá, Colombia, with satellite campuses in Cartagena, Santa Marta and Chía. Established in 1954, the institution was named after the botanist, scientist a ...
in 1980, before traveling to
New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
, where she completed a
Master of Fine Arts A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admi ...
degree at
New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
in 1984. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is married to Colombian novelist and sociologist Azriel Bibliowicz, whose work investigates the Jewish experience in Colombia. The couple lives and works in Bogotá.


Art as repair

Salcedo addresses the question of forgetting and memory in her installation artwork. In pieces such as ''Unland: The Orphan's Tunic'' from 1997 and the ''La Casa Viuda'' series from the early 1990s, Salcedo takes ordinary household items, such as a chair and table, and transforms them into memorials for victims of the Civil War in Colombia.Bal, Mieke. ''Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art'', University of Chicago Press, 2011 In his book ''Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory'',
Andreas Huyssen Andreas Huyssen (born 1942) is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Institute for Comparative Literature and ...
dedicates a chapter to Salcedo and ''Unland: The Orphan's Tunic'', presenting her work as “Memory Sculpture.” Huyssen offers a detailed description of the piece, a seemingly mundane table that, when considered closely, “captures the viewer's imagination in its unexpected, haunting visual and material presence.”Andreas Huyssen, ''Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsest and the Politics of Memory'' (Stanford, CA: Stanford, 2003), 113 A seemingly everyday piece of furniture is in fact made of two destroyed tables joined and covered with a whitish veil of fabric, presumably the orphan's original tunic. Upon even closer inspection, hundreds of small human hairs appear to be the thread that is attaching the tunic to the table. Huyssen equates the structure of the tables to the body. “If the tunic is like a skin...then the table gains a metaphoric presence as body, not now of an individual orphan but an orphaned community.” Salcedo's ''Unland'' is a memory sculpture, presenting the past of her own country of Colombia to the international art audience. During a conversation with Carlos Basualdo, Salcedo discusses her own approach to producing art:
“The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful. Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life...then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.”Interview with Carlos Basualdo in ''Doris Salcedo'', Edited by Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo and Andreas Huyssen (London: Phaidon, 2000), 21
Again, in a 1998 interview with Charles Merewether, Salcedo expounds upon this notion of the metamorphosis, describing the experience of the viewer with her own artistic repair or restoration of the past.
“The silent contemplation of each viewer permits the life seen in the work to reappear. Change takes place, as if the experience of the victim were reaching out...The sculpture presents the experience as something present- a reality that resounds within the silence of each human being that gazes upon it.”
Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, through these contemporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time. She joins the past and the present, repairs what she sees as incomplete and, in the eyes of Huyssen, presents “memory at the edge of an abyss...memory in the literal sense...and memory as process.”


Installations

Salcedo's work has become increasingly installation-based. She uses gallery spaces or unusual locations to create art and environments that are politically and historically charged. ''Noviembre 6 y 7'' (2002) is a work commemorating the seventeenth anniversary of the violent seizing of the Supreme Court in Bogotá on November 6 and 7, 1985. Salcedo placed this piece in the new Palace of Justice. It took her over the course of 53 hours (the duration of the original siege) to place wooden chairs against the façade of the building being lowered from different points on its roof. Salcedo did this as creating “an act of memory”. Her goal was to re-inhabit the space that was forgotten. In 2003, in a work she called ''Installation for the 8th Istanbul Biennial'', she did an installation in a commonplace street consisting of 1,500 wooden chairs stacked precariously in the space between two buildings. In 2005, at the Castello di Rivoli, Salcedo reworked one of the institution's major rooms by extending the existing vaulted brick ceiling of the gallery. Subtly transforming the existing space, ''Abyss'' was designed to evoke thoughts of incarceration and entombment. In 2007, Salcedo became the eighth artist to have been commissioned to produce work for the Unilever turbine hall of the
Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...
gallery in
London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
for which she created ''
Shibboleth A shibboleth ( ; ) is any custom or tradition—usually a choice of phrasing or single word—that distinguishes one group of people from another. Historically, shibboleths have been used as passwords, ways of self-identification, signals of l ...
'', a 167-metre-long crack running the length of the hall's floor (''pictured above'') that Salcedo says "represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe". In this way her installation represented exclusion, separation and otherness.


Exhibitions

Salcedo has exhibited in group exhibitions internationally including Carnegie International (1995), XXIV São Paulo Biennial (1998),
Trace Trace may refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * ''Trace'' (Son Volt album), 1995 * ''Trace'' (Died Pretty album), 1993 * Trace (band), a Dutch progressive rock band * ''The Trace'' (album), by Nell Other uses in arts and entertainment * ...
, The Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art (1999), Documenta XI, Kassel (2002), 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003), 'NeoHooDoo', PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York, The Menil Collection, Houston (2008), 'The New Décor', Hayward Gallery, London (2010), and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College (2014–15). Solo exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1998),
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art ...
(1999 and 2005),
Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in En ...
, London (1999), Camden Arts Centre, London (2001),
White Cube White Cube is a contemporary art gallery founded by Jay Jopling in London in 1993. The gallery has two branches in London: White Cube Mason's Yard in central London and White Cube Bermondsey in South East London; White Cube Hong Kong, in Centra ...
, London (2004),
Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...
, London (2007), The 80's: A Topology (2007), and Inhotim, Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Belo Horizonte, (2008). From April 2010 through February 2013, the artist's installation “plegaria Muda” traveled to museums throughout Europe and South America, including MUAC, Mexico; Moderna Museet, Malmö and CAM Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2011); MAXXI Rome and Pinacoteca São Paulo (2012), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. (2015); and
Harvard Art Museums The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...
(2016).


Recognition

* 1995 –
Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...
* 2005 – The Ordway Prize, from the Penny McCall Foundation * 2010 – Velázquez Visual Arts Prize * 2014 – Hiroshima Art Prize * 2016 – Inaugural Nasher Prize for Sculpture,
Nasher Sculpture Center Opened in 2003, the Nasher Sculpture Center is a museum in Dallas, Texas, that houses the Patsy and Raymond Nasher collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. It is located on a site adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art in the Dal ...
* 2017 –
Rolf Schock Prizes The Rolf Schock Prizes were established and endowed by bequest of philosopher and artist Rolf Schock (1933–1986). The prizes were first awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1993 and, since 2005, are awarded every three years. It is sometimes consider ...
in Visual Arts * 2019 – Nomura Art Award


Analysis of individual artworks

''Istanbul'' is an installation made up of 1,550 chairs stacked between two tall urban buildings. Salcedo's idea with this piece was to create what she called "a topography of war." She clarifies this by saying it is meant to "represent war in general and not a specific historical event". Salcedo is quoted saying "seeing these 1,550 wooden chairs piled high between two buildings in central Istanbul, I'm reminded of mass graves. Of anonymous victims. I think of both chaos and absence, two effects of wartime violence." Salcedo explains, “What I'm trying to get out of these pieces is that element that is common in all of us.” “And in a situation of war, we all experience it in much the same way, either as victim or perpetrator. So I'm not narrating a particular story. I'm just addressing experiences.” In 2007, four years after Salcedo's installation in Istanbul, another artist, Chinese dissident
Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei ( ; , IPA: ; born 28 August 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been ...
, used chairs to create a memory effect in his piece ''Fairytale''. He installed the set of 1001 Ming and Qing dynasty chairs at Documenta 12 in Kassel,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
, one chair for each of the 1001 Chinese travelers displaced. His piece focused on Chinese displacement, a similar topic to Salcedo. ''Atrabiliarios'' is an installation that incorporates plywood, shoes, animal fiber, thread, and sheepskin all in six different niches. In her piece old shoes, in pairs and singles, are encased behind sheets of translucent animal skin inside alcoves or niches in the gallery wall. The skin is crudely stitched to the wall with medical sutures. On the floor underneath are some small boxes made from the same animal skin. The worn shoes all belonged to women who 'disappeared', and were donated to Salcedo by the victims' families. The use of these shoes in ''Atrabiliarios'' is meant to echo the memory of those whose fate and whereabouts is unknown. Salcedo describes this a being "permanently suspended between the present and the past". Therefore, ''Atrabiliarios'' is "not only a portrait of disappearance, but a portrait of the survivors' mental condition of uncertainty, longing and mourning." Salcedo is seeking not only to express the horror of violence but also to investigate the way people prevail in times of torture, repairing their physical and psychological wounds, as well as raising resistance and remembering those who are missing. ''Shibboleth'' was her Turbine Hall installation at
Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...
in London. Salcedo was the first artist to change the physical building. Salcedo used this piece to give voice to the victims of all the injustices that have separated people and armed them against one another. Rather than fill Turbine Hall with an installation, she opened up a subterranean wound in the floor that stretched the entire length of the former power station. The concrete walls of the crevice were ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between elements that resisted each other and at the same time depended on one another. The installation began as a thin, almost invisible line at the main entrance and gradually widened into a chasm at the far end. This design was meant to evoke the brokenness and separateness of post-colonial cultures especially in her homeland of Colombia. ''Shibboleth'' raised questions about the interaction of ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built and questions about racism and colonialism that underlie the modern world. “The history of racism,” Salcedo said, “runs parallel to the history of modernity and is its untold dark side.” With ''Shibboleth'', Salcedo focused attention on the existence of a large, socially excluded underclass present in all societies. Salcedo said that breaking open the floor of Turbine Hall symbolized the fracture in modernity itself. This urged viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about history and people. The crack also represented the divide between rich and poor, which can start off relatively little but ultimately turn into a great divide that is capable of dismantling cultures. The crack was made whole at the conclusion of the show, yet there is a sliver that will always be there in the flooring. ''Flor de Piel'' is a room-sized installation first publicly exhibited at the
Harvard Art Museums The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...
in Salcedo's 2016-2017 solo exhibition, ''Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning''. ''A Flor de Piel'', measuring 340 cm x 500 cm, is a tapestry of thousands of preserved, hand-sewn red rose petals, that undulates softly on the floor. Suspended in a state of transformation, the petals linger between life and death and are so vulnerable that they tear if touched. The artist intended the work to be a shroud for a nurse who was tortured to death in the Colombian war. Salcedo created the piece in 2013, working with rose petals and thread as her materials; ''A Flor de Piel'' was acquired by the Harvard Art Museums in 2014. ''Plegaria Muda'' is a series of sculptures, each composed of two hand-crafted tables, which are approximately the same shape and size of a coffin. One table lays upside down on the other, with an earthlike layer with grass growing between the two table tops. "Plegaria Muda" translates roughly to "silent prayer", and is a comment on the relationships between the perpetrators of gang violence and their victims, as well as a homage to the mass grave sites In Colombia where victims of gang violence are often buried.


Current research and themes

Since 1988 Salcedo has interviewed people whose relatives have been " disappeared" by presumably order of the military associated with Colombia's civil war and illegal drug trade. She regularly visits abandoned villages, murder sites, and mass graves. Salcedo reports that she has been doing much of the same research for many years with only small variations. For many years she kept files on
concentration camp A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitati ...
s, these included both historical and more contemporary camps. She is most interested in how they vary from one another because they are always there just presented in different forms. Salcedo states that her one focus has always been political violence and that "violence defines the evils of our society."
"I was amazed when Guantanamo was opened in
Cuba Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...
, because Cuba was the first place that had a concentration camp. Actually it was a Spanish invention. A Spanish general, Martinez Campos, thought it up in 1896. At that time they implemented it in Cuba. It's amazing to see how it has come full circle. Now you have Guantanamo again in Cuba. But of course the British had it at the end of the nineteenth century in
South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...
. Then the Germans had it in
West Africa West Africa, also known as Western Africa, is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations geoscheme for Africa#Western Africa, United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Gha ...
. Then you have killing fields, forced labor camps, gulags—the list is endless. I have come to the conclusion that the industrial prison system in the United States has many of these elements, where people, for really no reason, for possession of marijuana or things like that are going to jail, where some minor crimes have become felonies. I'm really shocked by the sheer numbers of people being thrown into jails. And also I think it's amazing how this system, being in jail and then going out, has so many collateral effects that a fairly large portion of the population are not allowed to be alive. The idea of having a large portion of the population excluded from civil rights, from many, many possibilities, implies that you have people that can almost be considered socially dead. What does it mean to be socially dead? What does it mean to be alive and not able to participate? It's like being dead in life. That's what I am researching now, and that is the perspective I have been looking at events from for a long time."


See also

*
Andreas Huyssen Andreas Huyssen (born 1942) is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Institute for Comparative Literature and ...
* Dario Robleto


References


Further reading

* Bal, Mieke. ''Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art'', University of Chicago Press, 2011, 264 pages * Princenthal, Nancy, Carlos Basualdo and Andrea Huyssen, ''Doris Salcedo'', Phaidon, London, 2000, 160 pages * Saggio, Antonino, "Doris Salcedo o del fare", ''L'Architetto Italiano'', n.24 pp. 86–87 * Widholm, Julie Rodrigues and Madeleine Grynsztejn, eds. ''Doris Salcedo'', University of Chicago Press, 2015, 240 pages


External links


White Cube: Doris Salcedo



Tate Modern Turbine Hall: ''Shibboleth''



Doris Salcedo, on RAI Arts portal

WSJ on Doris Salcedo wins Nasher Prize

Doris Salcedo
* Watch Doris Salcedo in conversation with Francesca Pietropaolo (Brooklyn Rail, August 25, 2023):https://brooklynrail.org/events/2023/08/25/doris-salcedo/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Salcedo, Doris 1958 births Living people Colombian sculptors 20th-century sculptors 21st-century sculptors Installation artists 20th-century Colombian women artists 21st-century Colombian women artists Artists from Bogotá Colombian women sculptors Colombian artists Jorge Tadeo Lozano University alumni New York University alumni Academic staff of the National University of Colombia