Doris Salcedo

Doris 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.

In his book Present Pasts: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen dedicates a chapter to Doris 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.” A seemingly everyday piece of furniture is in fact made of two destroyed tables joined together 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.

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.

Flor de Piel is a room-sized installation first publicly exhibited at the Harvard Art Museums 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. 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.

For 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 (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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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 camps, 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.

Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian-born visual artist and sculptor. 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, Colombia.

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia. Salcedo 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.

"I was amazed when Guantanamo was opened in Cuba, 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. Then the Germans had it in West Africa. 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."