Tag: installation

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

Text: 

Field Notes from A Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert

Image:

Jenny Holzer
Wanås Wall , 2002
260 inscriptions in 1800 meters stone wall / 260 inscriptions in 1,800 meters of dry-stone wall
“When Jenny Holzer was invited to exhibit at Wanås, she was fascinated by the historic stone walls that run along the outer boundaries of the park, a descent in the Swedish countryside that tells about the work of older people. She let the stone shaker from the neighborhood sandblast four text series in selected stones. In total there are 260 text lines that appear on a regular basis in the 1.8 km long wall. The artwork begins at the park’s entrance with Truisms.”

–Wanas  

Mona Hatoum

Home

1999

“Home consists of a long table covered with gleaming metal kitchen appliances. The table has a polished wooden top and heavy metal legs on wheels. The industrial connotations of the table are offset by the domestic kitchen utensils on its surface, including graters, scissors, a colander, a whisk, a ladle, salad servers, a sieve, a pasta maker, presses and a heart-shaped pastry cutter. Wires snake through the installation, connected to each utensil with crocodile clips. The wires conduct electrical currents to the objects periodically illuminating small light bulbs positioned beneath the sieve and colander and inside an upright grater. The current is controlled by a software programme that alters the frequency and intensity of the lights. Speakers amplify the crackling sound of electricity coursing through the wires and the metal objects. The sculpture is set back behind a barrier of thin horizontal steel wires that separates the viewer from the potentially lethal current.

Hatoum appropriates objects related to the domestic kitchen, traditionally a feminine domain, and gives them a menacing, uncanny edge. The work’s title expresses an ironic, ambivalent relationship to the safe, nurturing environment that the word home implies. The artist has explained, ‘I called it Home, because I see it as a work that shatters notions of the wholesomeness of the home environment, the household, and the domain where the feminine resides. Having always had an ambiguous relationship with notions of home, family, and the nurturing that is expected out of this situation, I often like to introduce a physical or psychological disturbance to contradict those expectations.’ (quoted in ‘Mona Hatoum interviewed by Jo Glencross’, in Mona Hatoum: Domestic Disturbance, p.68) Home evokes the small scale anguish of domestic drudgery and the claustrophobia of gender roles. Hatoum has commented, ‘I see kitchen utensils as exotic objects, and I often don’t know what their proper use is. I respond to them as beautiful objects. Being raised in a culture where women have to be taught the art of cooking as part of the process of being primed for marriage, I had an antagonistic attitude to all of that’ (quoted in Domestic Disturbance, p.65).”

—Tate

nevermores:

In the 1990s, while in her eighties, Louise Bourgeois devoted herself to the creation of these magical chambers, the Cells, in which she gathers objects that are dear to her and which are invested with a strong emotional charge. The Cells are places where she unravels the fabric of her memories and her emotions.

Precious liquids is an imposing cylindrical installation into which the spectator is invited to enter. It is a dark enclosed space, composed of a cylindrical cedar water tank, such as can be seen on the rooftops of New York, and designed for collecting “precious liquids”.
The liquids are those that the human body produces when subjected to emotions such as fear, joy, pleasure, suffering. Blood, milk, sperm and tears are thus the precious liquids that the artist orchestrates in this space.
At the centre of the strange barrel is an old iron bed surrounded by posts supporting glass spheres, whose function is to decant, via the pipes that connect them to the puddle of water in the middle of the bed, the liquid that rises when it evaporates and falls back down again when it condenses.