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Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.
Her early sculptures and installations, such as La Casa Viuda (1992-1995), combined domestic furniture with textiles and clothing. Salcedo derived her materials from research into Colombia’s recent political history, so these belongings, suffused with the patina of use, were directly linked to personal and political tragedy. During the past few years, Salcedo’s work has become increasingly installation-based, using the gallery spaces or unusual locations to create vertiginous environments charged with politics and history. Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002) was a commemoration of the seventeenth anniversary of the violent seizing of the Supreme Court, Bogotá on 6 and 7 November, 1985. Salcedo sited the work in the new Palace of Justice where, over the course of 53 hours (the duration of the siege), wooden chairs were slowly lowered against the façade of the building from different points on its roof, creating “an act of memory” in order to re-inhabit this space of forgetting. In 2003, in Istanbul, she made an installation on an unremarkable street comprising 1,600 wooden chairs stacked precariously in the space between two buildings. In 2005, at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Salecdo re-worked one of the institution’s major rooms by extending the existing majestic, vaulted brick ceiling of the gallery. The installation subtly transformed the existing space, evoking thoughts of incarceration and entombment.
Doris Salcedo has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions internationally including 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003), Documenta XI (2002) and XXIV São Paolo Biennial (1998). Solo exhibitions include SF MOMA (1999 and 2005), Camden Arts Centre, London (2001), Tate Gallery, London (1999) and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1998).
More on Doris Salcedo
| Artworks | |
 | II 4 Images |
 | III 4 Images |
 | IV 4 Images |
 | V 4 Images |
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Failing Better - Salcedo's Trajectory by Rod Mengham | |
| Exhibitions | |
| Doris Salcedo 15 Sep—20 Oct 2007 | |
| Neither 10 Sep—18 Oct 2004 | |
| La Casa Viuda VI 15 Sep—14 Oct 1995 | |
| Editions | |
| Abyss Edition of 45 | |
| Shibboleth Edition of 45 | |
| Artist's Publications Available in the Bookshop |
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| Doris Salcedo 2007 | |
| Neither 2004 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.alexanderandboni... Alexander and Bonin, New York | |
| http://www.tate.org.uk/serv... Tate Online | |
| http://www.newmuseum.org/ex... New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York | |
| http://collections.sfmoma.o... San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco | |
 | Back to Artist Index |