Tag: doris salcedo

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.

Jenny Holzer, Truisms (Marquees), 1993, installation, NYC

Muriel Zeller, “Self, Time and External Circumstances”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Mother”

Mona Hatoum, Marrow , 1996, rubber, 128.3 x 58.4 x 50.8 cm. (50.5 x 23 x 20 in

Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 1987, Steel cot, steel shelving, rubber, 10 plastic dolls and pig intestine, 1870 x 2410 x 460 mm, 65, Tate

Tracey Emin, Terribly Wrong 1997, monoprint on paper, 58.2 x 81.1. Tate

Frida Kahlo, My Birth, Mi Nacimiento, 1932

Anne Sexton, “The Abortion”

Sylvia Plath, April 18th 

Tracey Emin, Feeling Pregnant (in 6 parts) , 2000, clothes, wood and text