Doris Salcedo
Encyclopedia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
n-born sculptor
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
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Salcedo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1980, before traveling to New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts
Master of Fine Arts
A Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...
degree at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, and is generally composed of items of furniture
Furniture
Furniture is the mass noun for the movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating and sleeping in beds, to hold objects at a convenient height for work using horizontal surfaces above the ground, or to store things...
.
Doris Salcedo is the eighth artist to have been commissioned to produce work for the turbine hall of the Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
gallery in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Her piece, Shibboleth
Shibboleth (artwork)
Shibboleth was the title of a temporary art installation by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo in Tate Modern. The work took the form of a long crack in the floor.-The work:...
(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".
Art as Repair
Doris Salcedo addresses the question of forgetting and memory in her installation artwork. In pieces such as Unland: The Orhan’s Tunic from 1997and 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
Andreas Huyssen
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1986...
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.
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.”
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 .”
Further reading
- Bal, Mieke. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art (University of Chicago Press; 2011) 264 pages;