Tag: political art

Sue Williams, Irresistible, rubber, 1992, text on sculpture reads: Thanks for the beer. Love is forgiving. If you don’t care about yourself, how do you expect others to–you dumb bitch. I didn’t do that. Have you been seeing someone–huh slut. I think you like it mom. Look what you made me do. The No. 1 cause of injury to women is battery (men) Course no one asks what the women did. He’s under a lot of uh———oh do. So uptight. Can you find something to ram in her mouth? We don’t know if she enjoyed it or not. This case remains a mystery.

Kiki Smith, Blood Pool , 1993, wax, gauze and pigment

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

Mona Hatoum. (British of Palestinian origin, born in Beirut, Lebanon, 1952). + and -. 1994-2004. Sand , steel, aluminum, and electric motor, 10 5/8″ (27 cm) high x 13′ 1 ½” (400.1 cm) diameter. Fractional and promised gift of Jerry Speyer and purchase. © 2007 Mona Hatoum

“This work is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture’s hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.“

–MoMA

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.