Tag: installation

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

Sam Taylor Wood 

Travesty of a Mockery,

1995

The righteous attempts of a couple to outline their respective positions in an argument are mirrored in the dual screens of this installation. The changing channels of a radio places each stage of the argument to a different soundtrack, highlighting one of the major ways that emotion is manipulated by filmmakers.