Artist of the day: Artist of the day, December 13: Doris Salcedo, Colombian sculptor

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Artist of the day, December 13: Doris Salcedo, Colombian sculptor

Doris Salcedo (1958) is a Colombian-born sculptor who lives and works in Bogotá. 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. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 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.

Doris Salcedo is the eighth artist to have been commissioned to produce work for the turbine hall of the Tate Modern gallery in London. Her piece, Shibboleth (2007), is a 167-metre-long crack in the hall's floor 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".

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.

For her 2007 Unilever commission at Tate Modern, Salcedo created Shibboleth, a chasm running the length of the Turbine Hall that was to represent exclusion, separation and otherness.

Mrs Doris Salcedo

1985, Tenebrae, Noviembre 7
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1989-90, Sin título
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1989-2008, Untitled work
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1992-2004, Atrabiliarios

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 echoe 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.
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1992-2004, Atrabiliarios
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1995, La Casa Viuda VI
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1995, Untitled (detail)
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1995, Untitled
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1995-98, Unland
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1998, Unland- audible in the mouth
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

1998, Untitled
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2003, Istanbul Project II

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.

2003, Istanbul Project II
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2004 Neither
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2004-05, Untitled. Harvard Art Museum
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2005, Abyss
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2007, Shibboleth

Shibboleth was her Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern 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.
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2007, Shibboleth
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2008, Untitled
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2008-10, Plegaria Muda (detail)

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.

2008-10, Plegaria Muda
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

2014, A Flor de Piel

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.
© 2017, Doris Salcedo

Artist of the day

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Artist of the day, December 13: Doris Salcedo, Colombian sculptor

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