Synopses & Reviews
A mountain of chairs piled between buildings. Shoes sewn behind animal membranes into a wall. A massive crack running through the floor of Tate Modern. Powerful works like these by sculptor Doris Salcedo evoke the significance of bearing witness and processes of collective healing. Salcedo, who lives and works in Bogotandaacute;, roots her art in Colombiaandrsquo;s social and political landscapeandmdash;including its long history of civil warsandmdash;with an elegance and poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects. Her work is undergirded by intense fieldwork, including interviews with people who have suffered loss and endured trauma from political violence. In recent years, Salcedo has become increasingly interested in the universality of these experiences and has expanded her research to Turkey, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States.
Published to accompany Salcedoandrsquo;s first retrospective exhibition and the American debut of her major work Plegaria muda, Doris Salcedo is the most comprehensive survey of her sculptures and installations to date. In addition to featuring new contributions by respected scholars and curators, the book includes over one hundred color illustrations highlighting many pieces from Salcedoandrsquo;s thirty-year career. Offering fresh perspectives on a vital body of work, Doris Salcedo is a testament to the power of one of todayandrsquo;s most important international artists.
Review
andldquo;Gives readers an inspirational look at this seminal artist. . . . Recommended.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;[Salcedoandrsquo;s] first major retrospective . . . is an important one for American audiences, collecting as it does decades of sculptures that explore dark psychic places.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Salcedo presents an important, even essential, means of thinking about memorializing incomprehensible suffering, about speaking of and to loss, about remembering what victims are no longer present to remind us of.andrdquo;andnbsp;
Synopsis
With work in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate, London, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b.1958) is one of today's most internationally respected South American sculptors. Inspired as much by poetry and philosophy as by the affecting material qualities of sculpture, Salcedo subtly and painstakingly transforms everyday household objects and garments - symbols of a vanished existence and of the human tragedies that are its cause. In Atrabiliaros (1991-6) abandoned shoes of 'disappeared' Colombian people, half-concealed behind membranes of animal fibre, become ghost-like symbols of mourning. In Salcedo's ongoing untitled works, wooden furnishings, worn by long use and filled with concrete, mutely evoke the lives they once served.
American art critic Nancy Princenthal surveys Salcedo's work in terms of the universal themes it evokes, contextualized in discussion of contemporary scultural practice. New York-based poet and curator Carlos Basualdo discusses with the artist her formative influences, which range from the art of precedecessors such as Joseph Beuys to the writings of philosophers and poets. German literary critic Andreas Huyssen focuses on Salcedo's sculpture Unland: The Orphan's Tunic (1997). For the Arist's Choice, Salcedo has selected two texts: an extract from Otherwise Than Being (1974) by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and poems by Paul Celan. The Doris Salcedo's observations on the human condition and its reflection in the work of poets, novelists and thinkers are discussed in conversation with art historian Charles Merewether.
About the Author
Julie Rodrigues Widholm is curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Madeleine Grynsztejn is the Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Table of Contents
Directorand#8217;s Foreword
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Acknowledgments
Madeleine Grynsztejn and Julie Rodrigues Widholm
Introduction
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Presenting Absence: The Work of Doris Salcedo
Julie Rodrigues Widholm
Seeing Things
Elizabeth Adan
Plates
Doris Salcedoand#8217;s Readymade Time
Helen Molesworth
The Muted Drum: Doris Salcedoand#8217;s Material Elegies
Katherine Brinson
A Work in Mourning
Doris Salcedo
Exhibition History
Bibliography
Compiled by Steven L. Bridges
Exhibition Checklist
Contributors
Exhibition Sponsors
Lenders to the Exhibition
Index