Tag: colombian art

Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios, 1996. Drywall, shoes, cow bladder, and surgical thread, 47 x 83 1/16 inches (119.4 x 211 cm). Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy Alexander & Bonin. © Doris Salcedo

“Since the mid-1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has made works that attest to the human consequences of criminal and political violence. Salcedo’s sculptures and installations are informed by her extensive research and fieldwork in rural communities in her native Colombia, particularly the testimonies of victims of political persecution. Her work both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently unspoken and lingering effects of trauma. Her unorthodox medium is a combination of domestic furniture and unyielding building materials such as concrete and steel. By distorting the familiar, she transforms our perception of home from a place of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation. Instead of engaging the traditional methods of sculpture such as carving or molding, she realizes her work through acts of physical and symbolic violence: filing, scratching, bending, beating, fusing, melting, and burying.Atrabiliarios is one of Salcedo’s earliest and most powerful depictions of violence, suffering, and loss. The title references the Latin expression atra bilis, which describes the melancholy associated with mourning. Worn shoes are inserted into a cavity in the gallery wall that is then covered with stretched cow bladder. This skin-like membrane is coarsely sewn to the wall with surgical thread, creating a milky layer between the viewer and the discarded footwear. Salcedo collected the shoes from the families of desaparecidos: the people, mainly women, who have mysteriously “disappeared” from their homes, a method of social control commonly practiced in Colombia during the internal conflict between paramilitary and guerilla forces in the 1980s. Now discarded, the once-lived-in shoes offer a metaphor for the body’s absence, a specter of loss and death summoned further by the sewn “skin” that encloses them, calling to mind post-autopsy stitching.This work adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture and of works in all mediums by artists who explore the subject of war and sociopolitical violence, including Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura.2014.33Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women“

—ICA Boston

Source: icaboston.org

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth, 2007-08, installation, Tate Modern 

“Salcedo has offered few explanations beyond stating how the fissure represents the immigrant experience in Europe. Though this theme is apparent in the work, it is by no means the only issue raised. As photographs of the installation demonstrate, visitors contorted their bodies in infinite ways as they tried to see below the crack. In Shibboleth, Salcedo elaborates a complex socio-political topic in a work with a tremendous formal presence.
Coded identification
Salcedo’s installation requires attentive viewing. The rupture measures 548 feet in length but its width and depth vary (changing from a slight opening to one several inches wide and up to two feet in depth). The viewer’s perception into the crevice alters, as he or she walks and shifts to better glimpse inside the cracks and appreciate the interior space, notably the wire mesh embedded along the sides.

Change in perspective is one of Salcedo’s goals. She quotes the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno: “We should all see the world from the perspective of the victim, like Jewish people that were killed with their head down in the Middle Ages. So he wonders, what is the perspective of a person that is agonizing in this position?”

Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel (detail), 2011, Rose petals and thread, 1333.5 x 650 cm, D.Daskalopoulos Collection Installation view: Doris Salcedo, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, February 21–May 2

“To create A Flor de Piel, Doris Salcedo sutured together hundreds of rose petals into a delicate shroud that undulates softly on the floor. Suspended in a state of transformation, the petals linger between life and death and are so vulnerable that they tear if touched. For Salcedo, fragility becomes the essence of the work as she sought to create an “image that is immaterial.” The title is a Spanish idiomatic expression used to describe an overt display of emotions. While that meaning is lost when literally translated, the phrase a flor de piel links flowers and skin, suggesting a sensation so overwhelming that it is expressed physically through a coloring of the body’s surface.

Salcedo’s installations and sculptures often employ minimal forms that subtly evoke the fragility of human life. Viewed in light of the brutal civil war in Salcedo’s native Colombia, this aesthetic sensibility takes on specific political resonances. Salcedo conceived the work A Flor de Piel while she was researching the events surrounding a female nurse who was tortured to death in Colombia and whose dismembered body has never been found. The artist has described the work as a floral offering to this victim of torture, as well as all of those who have been affected by violence. “Suturing the petals is very important because it was a way to bring together all these parts,” Salcedo has said. “Violence destroys everything. Torture destroys bodies. The idea is to bring them together and unite them and recover the force that they had.”¹

Lauren Hinkson

1. Doris Salcedo and Tim Marlow, “Doris Salcedo on A Flor De Pieland Plegaria Muda,” White Cube, May 25, 2012, accessed June 6, 2013.

  1. Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios [Irritable], 1996, wall installation with drywall, shoes, cow bladder and surgical thread (four niches), 116.8 × 170.2 cm, 46 × 67 in., photo © Todd-White Art Photography Courtesy White Cube, © Doris Salcedo and White Cube
  2. Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios [Irritable], 1996, wall installation with drywall, shoes, cow bladder and surgical thread (four niches), 116.8 × 170.2 cm, 46 × 67 in., photo courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales 
  3. Installation view: Doris Salcedo, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 26–October 12, 2015, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

“In ‘Atrabiliarios’ Salcedo evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer’s response is, in turn, emotional, even visceral, rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes as relics or attributes of lost people, donated by the families of those who have disappeared. Shoes are particularly personal items as they carry the imprint of our body more than any other item of clothing. She then sealed the niches with a membrane of cow bladder, which she literally sutured into the plaster of the wall as if picturing the literal process of internalised bodily memory. Barely visible through the animal skin membrane, the shoes are a haunting evocation of their absent owners and inevitably recall the grizzly souvenirs of Nazi death camps.”

— Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Doris Salcedo,

La Casa Viuda VI (detail), 1995

Wooden doors, steel chair, and bone
Three parts: 74⅞ x 39 x 18½ in. (190.2 x 99.1 x 47 cm); 62⅞ x 47 x 22 in. (159.7 x 119.3 x 55.8 cm); and 62½ x 38 x 18½ in. (158.7 x 96.5 x 46.9 cm)
Collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, gift of Shawn and Peter Leibowitz, New York, to American Friends of the Israel Museum
Photo: D. James Dee

“Salcedo’s interviews with displaced rural Colombian women forced out of their homes in search of safety resulted in the series La Casa Viuda. Doors without buildings, unmoored from their foundations, evoke the loss of home and lack of shelter that these families were forced to endure.The title of the series, roughly translated as “the widowed house,” furthers this sense of loss and disruption to the domestic sphere. Embedded within or joining the pieces of furniture, one finds other material remnants that evoke the human presence: a child’s toy chair, human bone, and articles of clothing. Using a strategy employed throughout her work, Salcedo creates uncanny experiences out of the seemingly familiar. As such, the house is transformed into a space of mourning.”—Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art 

Doris Salcedo, Untitled

Salcedo developed these works for the XXXI National Salon for Colombian Artists, held in Medellín in 1987. The sculptures are made primarily from abandoned hospital furniture and reveal the artist’s ongoing interest in combining different objects and materials for their symbolic value.

Untitled (1986), partially constructed from a found bed frame, juxtaposes animal tissue, ten plastic dolls, and the severe angularity of the steel frame. Salcedo physically transformed the surfaces and colors of these objects, applying acids or allowing the pieces to weather and collect dust. These works developed out of the artist’s consideration of how Colombian drug cartels have recruited poor boys from Medellín as hired assassins, known in Spanish as sicarios.

Doris Salcedo

Nov 7, 4 pm
280 wooden chairs and rope
Dimensions variable
Site-specific work, Palace of Justice, Bogotá, 2002

Some 280 wooden chairs were lowered from the roof of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá on the 17th anniversary of the siege of the Palace by M-19 guerrillas and the government’s counterattack in 1985.Noviembre 6 y 7, 2002

Neither
2004
193 12/16 x 290 3/16 x 588 4/16 in. (494 x 740 x 1500 cm)
Plasterboard and steel

“Doris Salcedo Neither10 September – 17 October 2004Hoxton SquareFor her exhibition at White Cube Hoxton Square Colombian artist Doris Salcedo presented Neither, a new large-scale work. The artist made a charged and discrete installation, a complete re-working of the building’s interior walls. On closer inspection, it became clear that there were new ‘walls’ inside the gallery, which had been marked and textured by wire fencing pressed at various levels into their dry surface. The physical effect was one of disturbing ambiguity between something welcoming (the safe haven of four walls) and something imposing, operating in the space between notions of architectural protection and spatial demarcation.Making spatial coordinates unfamiliar is a function of much of Salcedo’s work, an artist who is known for her poetic sculptures that often incorporate domestic wooden furniture such as chairs, chests, wardrobes or beds to make felt a sense of tragedy or profound emotional unease. These works lay evidence to lives that have been erased as if the living, breathing forms that once used the furniture have been submerged within their own support structure. In 2002, Salcedo made an epic work entitled Noviembre 6 y 7, a commemoration of the 17th anniversary of the violent seizing of the supreme court in Bogotá on the 6th and 7th of November 1985. Salcedo sited the work in the new Palace of Justice, where over the course of 48 hours (the duration of the battle) wooden chairs were slowly lowered over the façade of the building. The work functioned as ‘an act of memory’, a way of inhabiting the space of forgetting.In 2003, for the 8th Istanbul Biennale, Salcedo made a large-scale installation that consisted of 1,600 wooden chairs stacked together in the space between two buildings on a busy, commercial side street in the centre of the city. The chairs were stacked at varying angles yet they created a mass with a completely flat surface. The space occupied by this installation became both saturated and empty; the flatness of the surface lent emphasis to the details. For Salcedo, the work was a topography of war, motivated by historical events in Turkey.Salcedo’s work could point to a kind of mental archaeology since all of her materials are charged with significance and transfused with the meanings that they have accumulated in everyday life. Neither has a choreographed tension that is experienced slowly, through the viewer’s visual appraisal of its rich surface detail.Salcedo’s work is, in part, influenced by her readings of philosophy (in particular, the writings of Emmanuel Levinas) and literature (especially the poetry of Paul Celan), as well as by the ‘social’ sculpture of Joseph Beuys. Neither also refers in part to an opera by American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman from 1977, which incorporates a libretto written by Samuel Beckett, whose sparse, nihilistic poetry conveys the weight of human existence. On a symbolic level, Neither is paradoxical since it renders its materials reliant on each other while at the same time, wresting them of their function. Devoid of objects, its subject is the gallery space itself, removed and re-created to constitute what Salcedo has described as an ‘image of emptiness, a lack and opacity’.“

—White Cube