Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian visual artist and sculptor."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.Biography on Tate Collection website. URL accessed on 8 April 2007. 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, Colombia.
Early life and education Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in 1980, before traveling to New York City, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University 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 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, 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 on this notion of metamorphosis, describing the viewer's experience 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 victim's experience 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."Interview with Charles Merewether in Doris Salcedo, 137 Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with a strong 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 seizure 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 53 hours (the duration of the original siege) to place wooden chairs against the building's façade, which were lowered from different points on its roof. Salcedo did this by 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 installed 1,500 wooden chairs precariously in a commonplace street, stacked 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 gallery in London, for which she created Shibboleth, a 167-metre-long crack running the length of the hall's floor.Colombian Art Salcedo said it "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. It was named by Frieze as No.21 of "The 25 Best Works of the 21st Century".
Exhibitions Salcedo has exhibited in group exhibitions internationally including Carnegie International (1995), XXIV São Paulo Biennial (1998), Trace, 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 (1999 and 2005), Tate Britain, London (1999), Camden Arts Centre, London (2001), White Cube, London (2004), Tate Modern, 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 (2016).
Recognition 1995 – Guggenheim Fellowship"John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation - Doris Salcedo", John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Retrieved 15 November 2018. 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 2017 – Rolf Schock Prizes in Visual Arts"Rolf Schock Prize Recipients 2017" , The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Retrieved 15 November 2018. 2019 – Nomura Art AwardGareth Harris (October 31, 2019), Doris Salcedo wins world's largest contemporary art prize of $1m The Art Newspaper. 2024 – Praemium Imperiale
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, 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, 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.