Doris Salcedo

When a beloved person is missing, everything is filled with his presence, each space is a memory of his absence, as this was stronger than his presence…

To make public a private violence, the experience must be brought in a collective space.  Doris Salcedo testify with her works the violence perpetrated in her Country: Colombia. For her installations sometimes she uses objects, pieces of furniture, dresses and personal things belonging to the missing person.

In her work Shibboleth, created directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London she created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically moves our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture. In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself. Her work encourages us to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, and without self-deception.




‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.

Impressive is the installation “chairs” , for the 8th Instambul Biennale in 2003, where a gap in the row of buildings is filled with 1600 chairs. A quarter characterized by hardware stores and small ironmongery businesses. After quitting time and on Sundays they are closed, and the streets are nearly empty.

 "Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.

Doris Salcedo was born in Bogota, Columbia in 1958. She received her BFA from the Universitad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano (1980) and a MFA in sculpture from New York University (1984). Salcedo received a grant from the Penny McCall Foundation in 1993, and a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 1995. Salcedo's work has been seen in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and throughout the United States and Europe. Salcedo currently lives and works in Bogotá, Columbia.

 Byi SImona Cappellini