Doris SALCEDO. Catálogo. Retrospectiva MCA Chicago Febrero de 2015

Doris Salcedo
Edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine

Grynsztejn, with contributions by ElizabethAdan,
Katherine Brinson, Helen Molesworth, and
DorisSalcedo.
Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo accompanies the groundbreaking

retrospective of one of todays most significant and
influential artists. Salcedo, who lives and works in
Bogot, Colombia, produces meticulously handcrafted sculptures, site-specific gallery installations,
and major public interventions situated around the
globe. Her work is grounded in rigorous fieldwork,
including testimonies of victims who have suffered
trauma due to political violence, racism, systemic
inequality, and all-out war. Salcedos aesthetic
strategies have developed along with her growing
interest in engaging the civic sphere in works that
are geared toward collective acts of mourning and
bearing witness. With an elegant sensibility that
balances the poetic with the political, Salcedos
unforgettable worksmade of common materials
such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass,
and rose petalsare aesthetically and intellectually
powerful testaments to loss as well as survival. Essays
provide new scholarship on Salcedos thirty-year
career, including her approach to representation and
metaphor, her reinterpretation of the Duchampian
readymade, as well as her poetic constructions and
evocations of religious themes. The volume includes
more than one hundred illustrations highlighting
Salcedos sculptures and installations, as well as many
public works from the last fifteen years.
JULIE RODRIGUES WIDHOLM is curator at
theMuseum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
MADELEINE GRYNSZTEJN is Pritzker Director
of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
978-0-226-24458-7
3682 00a Salcedo Cover [mwd 12-1].indd 1
| Chicago
printed in italy
MCA Chicago
isbn:
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Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo
MCA Chicago
| Chicago
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Doris Salcedo
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Doris Salcedo
Julie Rodrigues Widholm

Madeleine Grynsztejn
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
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Contents
Directors Foreword
Acknowledgments
Madeleine Grynsztejn and Julie Rodrigues Widholm
12
Introduction
17
Presenting Absence: The Work of Doris Salcedo

29
Seeing Things
Elizabeth Adan
41
Plates
201
Doris Salcedos Readymade Time

Helen Molesworth
209
The Muted Drum: Doris Salcedos Material Elegies

Katherine Brinson
215
A Work in Mourning
Doris Salcedo
218
Exhibition History
Bibliography
Compiled by Steven L. Bridges
228
231
232
233
234
Exhibition Checklist
Contributors
Exhibition Sponsors
Lenders to the Exhibition
Index
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Directors Foreword
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is honored to present the work of Doris Salcedo, one of
the most renowned sculptors working today, in her
first major survey. The exhibition spans the artists
thirty-year career and represents all major bodies of
productionmany of which are shown together for
the first time. Salcedos sculptures and installations,
which are informed by her passionate study of the
humanities, in particular philosophy and poetry,
address some of the most troubled and troubling
aspects of human society. Herwork gives form to
pain, trauma, and loss, creating spaces for individual
and collective mourning, with a great sensitivity to
aesthetics and a dedication to making visible that
(and those) which often remains invisible.
Organizing this timely exhibition of one of the
worlds most seminal artists is no small task. It is
with the enduring vision and unwavering focus of
my cocurator, Julie Rodrigues Widholm, that this
herculean endeavor has been made possible. Her
oversight of the exhibition, catalogue, and accompanying documentary video reflects her curatorial
prowess and broad range of skills.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to
the exhibitions benefactors, without whose enlightened support, the sheer magnitude and significance
of this exhibition and accompanying publication
would not have been possible. We are indebted to
the generous lead support provided by the Harris
Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison
Harris: Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris,
Toni and Ron Paul, Pam and Joe Szokol, Linda
and Bill Friend, and Stephanie and John Harris.
Additional lead support is provided by Stefan Edlis
and Gael Neeson, The Bluhm Family Foundation,
Anne Kaplan, Howard and Donna Stone, The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Helen
and Sam Zell. Major support is provided by The
Chicago Community Trust; Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of Colombia, Ministry of Culture of Colombia,

and Embassy of Colombia in Washington D.C.;
Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul; Paula and Jim
Crown; Nancy and Steve Crown; Walter and Karla
Goldschmidt Foundation; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky;
Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch; and Kristin and
Stanley Stevens. Additional generous support is
provided by the National Endowment for the Arts,
Marilyn and Larry Fields, the Diane and Bruce
Halle Foundation, Agnes Gund, the Kovler Family
Foundation, Nancy and David Frej, MaryE.
Ittelson, Lilly Scarpetta, Jennifer Aubrey, the
Dedalus Foundation, Jacques and Natasha G
elman
Trust, Ashlee and Martin Modahl, Lois and Steve
Eisen and the Eisen Family Foundation, the North
Shore Affiliate of the MCA, Carla Emil and Rich
Silverstein, Jeanne and Michael Klein, Lisa and
John Miller, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation,
the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies
in the Fine Arts, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, MariaC.
Bechily and Scott Hodes, the Barbara Lee Family
Foundation, Jill Garling and Tom Wilson, Solita
Mishaan, and Sara Szold. The artists galleries have
also provided support to present the exhibition and
catalogue, and for this, along with their many other
contributions, we thank Jay Jopling and Daniela
Gareh of White Cube and Carolyn Alexander and
Ted Bonin of Alexander and Bonin. We also salute
members of the MCA Board of Trustees for their
courage and foresight in supportingthis project from
its inception.
In addition, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the
lenders to the exhibition, listed on page 233, who
have graciously agreed to part with their cherished
works for the duration of the tour, despite the delicate nature and the complexities of shipping and
installing Salcedos art.
For recognizing the importance of this exhibition,
and for joining the MCA in sharing the work of this influential artist with wider audiences, sincere thanks
are due to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
and Foundation Director Richard Armstrong and
Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman
Chief Curator Nancy Spector, and to the Prez Art
Museum Miami Director Thomas Collins and Chief
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Curator and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs

Tobias Ostrander.
This beautiful catalogue is greatly enhanced
by the thought-provoking essays of Elizabeth
Adan, Katherine Brinson, Helen Molesworth, Julie
Rodrigues Widholm, and Doris Salcedo. I thank
them for sharing their insights. The catalogue will
undoubtedly serve future generations of scholars
who seek to understand Salcedos different bodies
of work, as well as the larger,encompassing artistic
project of which they are apart.
Throughout this endeavor, Doris Salcedo has
been a constant source of inspiration and knowledge,
collaborating with us at every level. Her direct input
and tolerance for our many questions as well as neverending requests have made this exhibition what it is
today. In the end, the exhibition embodies the same
persistent spirit that emanates from Salcedos individual works: a presence that is at once sublime and
firmly rooted in the experience of everyday life. We
have long looked forward to the opportunity to present Salcedos extraordinary oeuvre, and we hope that
our audiences will find stimulation in encountering
its distinctive beauty and considering its many implications firsthand. Guided by and following her determination to realize the seemingly impossible, and
with her trust, we present the work of DorisSalcedo.
Pritzker Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
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Acknowledgments
Organizing exhibitions of contemporary art affords

the privilege of working with extraordinary artists
such as Doris Salcedo. Nearly five years in the
making, the show reveals our collaborations with
an artist of singular, unparalleled vision and drive.
This exhibition has given us the opportunity to
delve deeply into Salcedos multifaceted oeuvre,
which hastouched the lives of so many. Throughout
this project, we have grown to understand the complexity and accomplishments of her sculptures and
installations, each with its own subtle visual nuances
and profoundmeanings.
Organizing an exhibition of Doris Salcedos
work requires a level of international collegiality and
generosity that is evident everywhere in this project.
We express our sincere gratitude to a long list of
collaborators who accompanied us at different times
along the way. The lenders to the exhibition deserve
special recognition. Major works, hailing from four
continents and spanning Doris Salcedos thirty-year
career, have been graciously relinquished by their
owners for this momentous occasion. For parting
with cherished and fragile artworks for the sake of
this undertaking we thank Carolyn Alexander;
Alexander and Bonin; Art Gallery of Ontario; the Art
Institute of Chicago; Tiqui Atencio; Clarissa Alcock
Bronfman; Paul and Trudy Cejas; Marilyn and
Larry Fields; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco;
Fundacin Sorigu; Diane and Bruce Halle; the
Marieluise Hessel Collection; Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden; Inhotim Collection; Israel
Museum; Leo Katz; Jill and Peter Kraus; la Caixa
Contemporary Art Collection; Barbara Lee; Lisa and
John Miller; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum
of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Neue Galerie, Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel; Howard and Cindy Rachofsky; Doris Salcedo; San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate; Flvia and
Guilherme Teixeira; White Cube; as well as several

private collectors who wish to remain anonymous.
To gather a comprehensive presentation of
Doris Salcedos oeuvre, we have been honored to
work with the two galleries that have represented
her work for many years. At Alexander and Bonin,
we thank: Carolyn Alexander, Ted Bonin, Rebecca
Brickman, Ati Egas, Sabina Roslyakova, and Matthew
Flaherty. Special gratitude is reserved for our invaluable ally Carolyn Alexander, who has been a constant
source of support and insight to the artist, and who
generously provided unparalleled assistance in
locating important works and in facilitating introductions, arrangements, and materials. At White Cube,
we extend thanks and appreciation to Jay Jopling,
Susan May, Daniela Gareh, Susannah Hyman, Claire
Coombes, Katie-Marie Ford, Kate Perutz, Hannah
van den Wijngaard, andJon Lowe.
We salute our colleagues in Colombia who
have supported one of the countrys greatest artists. From the Republic of Colombias Ministry of
Culture, we thank in particular Minister of Culture
Mariana Garcs Crdoba; Arts Director Guiomar
Acevedo; Visual Arts Coordinator Carolina Ponce
de Len; and Visual Arts Advisor Diana Camacho;
and from the Republic of Colombia, Ministry of
Foreign Affairs we thank Ambassador of Colombia
to the United States Luis Carlos V
illegas; Director
of Cultural Affairs Luis Armando Soto Boutin; Cultural Attach Tatiana de Germn Ribn; and Visual
Arts Advisor Maria Paula Maldonado Mendoza. In
addition, we would like to recognize Director Mara
Mercedes Gonzlez of the Museum of Modern
Art Medelln, aswell as Jos Roca for his generous
efforts, and Leon Amitai and Tanya Bonakdar for
their thoughtful introductions. Special mention goes
to Mara Paz Gaviria for wisdom shared and generous
connectionsmade.
Marisa Sanchez, Paola Cabal, Huong Ngo, and
Cheryl Pope graciously provided feedback throughout this process. Mary Schneider Enriquez of Harvard
Art Museum, and Motoko Suhama and Yukie
Kamiya of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art willingly assisted in procuring research
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material and documentation. In this regard, we also

thank David Ayala, Sylvia Surez, and Julian Serna.
We are thrilled to share in this momentous
occasion with our colleagues at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Prez
Art Museum Miami. Thanks to their dedicated
interest and support, the exhibition will reach wider
audiences. We have been honored to work with the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation Director Richard Armstrong; Deputy Director
and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator
Nancy Spector; Curator, Contemporary Art Katherine Brinson; Assistant Curator Susan Thompson;
Senior Exhibition Manager Michael Sarff; Director
of Exhibition Design Melanie Taylor; Exhibition
Design Associate Aviva Rubin; Assistant Registrar
for Exhibitions Maggie Honold; and Manager of
Exhibition Installations Paul Bridge. From the
Prez Art Museum Miami, we have been honored to
work with Director Thomas Collins, Chief Curator
and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs Tobias
Ostrander, and Associate Curator Diana Nawi.
Accompanying the exhibition, this elegantly
designed catalogue contains a breadth of information, scholarly analysis, and a rich suite of images
that provide new and considerable insights into the
work of Doris Salcedo. Donna Wingate provided
editorial direction and coordinated its many logistics.
Graphic designer Joseph Logan and his assistant
Rachel Hudson embraced the demanding task of
creating the catalogues beautiful and clear design.
Adrian Lucia of Marquand Books oversaw the entire
project, while Ryan Polich and Leah Finger expertly
managed the digital imaging, file management,
and production, and Melissa Duffes assisted in the
refinement of the catalogues content. We also recognize Beth Chapple and Maggie Lee for their careful
assistance.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
we would first and foremost like to pay special tribute to Curatorial Assistant Steven Bridges, whose
keen intelligence, grace under pressure, and tireless attention to myriad details made him crucial
to the success of this endeavor. Special thanks are
also due to Janet Wolski in the Directors Office.

James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator Michael Darling,
Manilow Senior Curator Dieter Roelstraete, Curator
Lynne Warren, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator
Naomi Beckwith, Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial
Fellow Michelle Puetz, former Marjorie Susman
Curatorial Fellow Abigail Winograd, and Curatorial
Assistant Karsten Lund lent unwavering support
and acted as critical sounding boards throughout
the organization of the exhibition. Former Director of Convergent Programming Erika Hanner was
instrumental in maintaining the schedule for the
exhibition, and Curatorial Administrative Coordinator Alia Walston was invaluable in her abilities to
connect us and the artist across great distances and
complex schedules. Former Library Director Janice
Dillard, Library Director Mary R
ichardson, and
Librarian Sarah Wade ably compiledresearch, sourcing
catalogues, and other pertinent materials. Over the
years we have also relied on the diligent work of a
number of MCA interns, including Tyler Blackwell,
Alexandria Eregbu, Jenny Gerow, Mia Lopez, Alison
Pearlman, Lauren Schroeder, Gan Uyeda, and Gibran
Villalobos.
The installation for this exhibition is by far
one of the most complex the MCA has undertaken.
Director of Collections and Exhibitions Anne
Breckenridge Barrett, Chief Registrar Meridith
Gray, and Assistant Registrar for Exhibitions Chris
Hightower deftly coordinated the many intricacies required. Director of Production and Facilities
Don Meckley, Senior Preparator G.R. Smith,
Senior Preparator Brad Martin, as well their highly
capablecrew, displayed their formidable problem-
solvingprowess. Former Manager of Rights and
Images Christia Crook, Manager of Rights and
Images Bonnie Rosenberg, and former Rights and
Images Assistant Katie Levi also worked diligently
on the magnificent catalogue and auxiliary materials.
Our colleagues in the Education Department
developed a robust schedule of programs and interpretive strategies that connect the exhibition with
our audiences. We salute Beatrice C. Mayer Director
of Education Heidi Reitmaier, Polk Bros. Associate
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10
Director of Education Marissa Reyes, Programmer of

Education: Interpretation Susan Musich, Programmer of Education: Public Programs Michael Green,
and Coordinator: Public Programs and Interpretive
Practices Ann Meisinger for creating programs that
address the exhibitions many underlying themes.
The Design, Publishing, and New Media
department contributed to the success of the exhibitions publications across media platforms. We thank
Chief Content Officer Susan Chun, Editor in Chief
Lisa Meyerowitz, Editor Michael Kramer, Associate
Editor Lindsey Anderson, Assistant Editor Shauna
Skalitzky, Design Director C
hristopher Roeleveld,
Senior Designer Mollie Edgar, Designer Bryce
Wilner, Associate Director of Digital Media Anna C.
Lavatelli, Senior Digital Designer and Developer
Tobey Albright, former Digital Production Assistant
Jessica Mattison, former Production Manager Robyn
Paprocki, Production Manager Joe Iverson, and Digital Media Intern Maricela Ramirez.
Critical to the fiscal realization of the exhibition,
catalogue, and documentary film, our Development
officers at the MCA are a pleasure and inspiration
to work with. Their dedication and perseverance
allowed us to fully realize the artists and our vision
for this project. Chief Development Officer Lisa
Key led a stellar team: Deputy Director of Development Gwen Perry Davis; Director of Major Gifts
Nora Hennessy; Manager of Corporate, Foundation,
and Government Relations Courtney Rowe; former
Coordinator of Major Gifts Rory Pavach; Coordinator
of Major Gifts Martha Koch; and Director of Development Events Hillary Hanas. Chief Financial Officer Peggy Papaioannous gracious stewardship was of
the essence.
Director of Communications and Community
Engagement Matthew Renton, Director of Media
Relations Karla Loring, Associate Director of Communications and Community Engagement Lauren
Smallwood, Media Relations Manager Elena Grotto,
Social Media Manager Abraham Ritchie, and Communications Coordinator Elizabeth Kennedy collaborated on publicizing this major exhibition with
enthusiasm and staunch support.
Without a documentary video, a core part of the

artists work would go unrepresented. Producer Sarah
Wambold and Videographer Mike Alfini adroitly created a documentary film that was essential to including Salcedos major site-specific, ephemeral public
interventions within the space of the exhibition.
We thank interviewees Carolyn Alexander, Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev, Sergio Clavijo, Carlos Granada,
Tim Marlow, Ingrid Raymond, Doris Salcedo, Sir
Nicholas Serota, and Roberto Uribe for sharing
their insights into past major works by the artist. In
lending their expertise to the filming in Bogot we
further recognize Felipe Camacho, Carolina del Mar
Fernandez, Bibiana Rojas, Mateo Rudas, and Joaquin Uribe. We are also indebted to Esra Cankaya,
Marcella Beccaria, and Valentina Sonzogni for providing valuable archival footage.
The exhibition occasioned an opportunity for
the artist to develop and propose a major public
project Palimpsest (unrealized at the time of writing).
There aremany colleagues across the city of Chicago to whom we are indebted for contributing their
time, energy, and expertise to this endeavor: Eddie
Bocanegra, Michelle Boone, Matti Bunzl, Greg
Cameron, Sara Chapman, Paul DAmato, Don Davis,
Felicia Davis, Stuart Flack, Theaster Gates, Joseph
Gattuso, Dedrea Gray, Ronnie Gensler, H
allie
Gordon, Jack Guthman, Miles Harvey, M
onica
Haslip, Ronald Holt, Alex Kotlowitz, Benneth
Lee, Lisa Lee, Rob McHugh, Declan Monaghan,
Todd Murphey, Audrey Petty, Jennifer Rosenkranz,
Lincoln Schatz, Daniel Schulman, Andrew Seeder,
Lorelei Stewart, Robert Tazelaar, and Jan Tichy.
As part of her research for the development of
the public project proposal, Doris interviewed parents in Chicago who lost a child to gun violence in
the city. Ronald Holt and Reverend Autry Phillips
facilitated these meetings, and the parentsPriscilla
Simes, Annette Holt, Pamela Bosley, Carlota Lopez,
Kimberly Reeves, Veronica Parker, Danny Tolliver,
and Deneen Bohanon-Silmoneach displayed enormous courage and generosity in sharing their stories
with the artist.
Throughout this project, we have been indebted
to the incredible contributions of members of
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11
Doris Salcedos studio, a remarkable, astute, and

unmatched team of collaborators: Joaquin Sanabria,
Ingrid Raymond, Wbaldo Castao, William Ahumada,
Pia Mazzilli, and, formerly, Sergio Clavijo. Carlos
Granada has been the lynchpin in planning and
coordinating this presentation. As Doriss right-handman, he is the true expert on the artists work, and
he shared his knowledge with equanimity. Beyond
the studio, we also thank Azriel Bibliowicz, Doriss
husband and steadfast supporter of her work.
We extend personal thanks to those closest to
us for their unwavering support during the five years
we have spent on this endeavor: Tom Shapiro, and
Timothy, Maya, and Miles Widholm.
Finally, our deepest gratitude is extended to
Doris Salcedo, whose art and ideas inspired this
project in the first place. We thank her for trusting
us as partners in this venture. She has contributed
to the exhibition through the creation of artworks,
endured countless conversations and interviews,
given unstintingly and graciously of her time, and
assisted in innumerable other ways. For her extraordinary art, and for the opportunity to be enriched by
her friendship, we are profoundly grateful.
Pritzker Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
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Introduction
The work of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo

has long been a point of fixture for me, on both a
professional and a personal level. For more than
twenty years, the trajectory of Salcedos career has
intersected many times with my own, and these
experiences have left a strong and lasting impression: my encounters with the hauntingly beautiful
and unnerving visual poetics of her work have
shifted my everyday experience of the world. Like
the mostvisionary philosophy and poetry, her public
sculptures probe both the lone human soul and our
shared societal values, offering not answers but a
space for reflection and critical engagement.
This exhibition developed out of multiple
imperatives: Salcedos position as one of todays
mostinfluential yet less known artists creates a powerful need to highlight her art, and a comprehensive
survey of all of Salcedos bodies of work has never
before been mounted. And, while her art in general
is timeless in quality, it feels especially resonant
withthe present historical moment, and certainly in
the United States, where gun violence, immigration
policy, and income inequality are at the forefront of
our national consciousness.1 For these reasons and
many others, Julie Rodrigues Widholm and I began
talking about a large-scale exhibition with Salcedo
during a trip to Bogot in 2010. Five years on, the
sense of urgency and significance around this exhi
bition has only grown.
The work of organizing this first-ever, major
retrospective has reinforced certain observations
about Salcedos work, culled from many years of
working with her. Salcedos aesthetic strategies
have developed in tandem with her growing interestin the articulation of a civic, public space geared
toward the expression of collective acts of mourning.
Looking at the breadth of her oeuvre, I see how
the primary concerns of her practice have in many
ways remained intact even while her formal and
materialexplorations have continued to seek out

new possibilities of expression. For example, there
is a consistent use of pieces of domestic furniture
some found, including some that once belonged to
victims of political violence, and some made in the
studio. In Salcedos hands, these objects, closely
tied to human presence and to the social fabric
of theeveryday, are dismembered and regrafted
together in disturbing juxtapositions. They are
madefunctionless save for their clear conveyance
ofsome destructive process wreaked upon the
home.A language of disruption and incompletion
materializes first, the irruption of violence, and
second, its ongoing aftereffects of irresolution and
semilegibilitythe symptoms of trauma. Over
and again, the sculpted surfaces of Salcedos works
render a simultaneous and contradictory sense of
effacement and emergence, as if participating in the
seesaw of forgetting and remembering that often
manifests in the wake of shocking and injurious
events. While her commitment to embodying these
conditions is informed by her lived experience of
Colombias troubled history, her work of the last fifteen years points to a global contemporary condition
wrought by larger social and political forceswar,
expulsion, involuntary migration, racism, permanent
inequalitythat is insufficiently acknowledged. War
and its aftermath are everywhere evident today, and
so, too, the cycles of grief and mourning that ensue,
affective states suffered by individual human beings
each in their own way.
Beginning with the firsthand testimony and
experience of individuals who have suffered tragedy and loss, Salcedo fashions works that recognize
and legitimize the lives lived by these subjects.
And by giving physical manifestation to individual
experiences of human suffering, she bears testimony to those larger mechanisms of power that
have diminished peoples sense of both self and
the public realm. This process is an integral part of
her practice; in research conducted in preparation
for a public project here in Chicago, for example,
she interviewed mothers who had lost their young
sons to gun violence in the city.2 In many of her
finished works, no literal connection to a specific
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individual is recognizable, but the works still communicate an explicit sense of loss and anguish, and
of corporealfragility.
Though anchored in real events, and often
incorporating real material traces, Salcedos works
emphatically elide representation, preferring the
visual strategy of an aesthetics held in suspension.
Itis precisely because of their provisional nature
that processes such as sewing and suturing, piercing
and puncturing, return in different bodies of work
over the years, whether in the impaling of stacks of
plastered shirts by lengths of steel rebar (Untitled,
198990/2013; pp. 5053), the crude surgical stitching that closes off the niches of Atrabiliarios (1992
2004; pp.10209), the follicle-sized holes drilled into
the surfaces of each of the works in the Unland series
legaria Muda (200810;
(199598; pp. 12235) and P
pp. 18491), or, more recently, the suturing of rose
petals constituting AFlor de Piel (2014; pp. 19293).
This combination of puncturing and suturing
mending and woundingvisually recapitulates the
unresolved nature of the tragedy that is the works
first source and to which it always indirectly points,
never to be resolved but also never to be forgotten or
dismissed.
Salcedos use of gestures such as stitching, grafting, and patching is also and importantly part of a
larger program emphasizing the labor inherent in the
making of her works. The sculptures are clearly the
results of intense acts of working and reworking. An
exhausting process of painstaking handiwork may be
the only way Salcedo allows herself to feel that she
can bear legitimate witness to pain and suffering, to
the gratuitous and uncompensated work of loss,
as if in solidarity with those who manually labor at
societys margins.3 The visceral and insistent materiality born of this laborwhose rawness is often
compounded by the discreet yet highly charged
inclusion of organic matter such as hair, bone,
and fabricvigorously grounds the work in the
world, and puts the beholder in its immediate and
emphatic presence. Perhaps Salcedo seeks this insistent and continuous presentness because she sees
it as the necessary precursor to any possible agency
on the part of the works viewer: in the affective
communication that takes place between artwork

and viewerin the rendering and recognition of an
injusticelies the hope for a real space of community and communication.4 This hope has recently
driven Salcedo to work in the public sphere, an arc
rising formally from the site-specific nature of her
gallery installations.
Over the past thirty years, Salcedo has created
a number of series, comprised of sculptures that,
though created to stand alone, are also conceived as
parts of carefully devised, larger installations. After
their inaugural exhibitions, these bodies of work
have, more often than not, been shown separately
from each other, and some series have never been
reassembled: recovering their original presentations
is one of our goals. The exhibition begins with
some of the artists earliest works from the 1980s,
all untitled and composed of discarded objects and
materials that the artist salvaged from an old hospital in Bogot. The installation of these works from
1987 is one of those being re-created for the first
time (p.20). The same is true of another installation of early works: found hospital beds wrapped in
animal fibers and fabric, along with stacks of white
cotton shirts pierced through the chest by steel
rebar (pp.4647). Salcedos largest and perhaps
best-known body of work to date is the group of
untitled sculptures that fuse domestic furniture with
concrete and steel, made between 1989 and 2008
(pp.58101); of these, the exhibition presents the
largest selection seen together in more than fifteen
years. The installation of these works, powerful in
and of themselves (designed around different groupings with the occasional outlier, and varying rhythmically in size and scale) is always configured in
situ,and in such a way as to require visitors to navigate among closely fitted works seemingly casually
arrayed, as if still in the process of being installed.
LaCasa Viuda (199295; pp. 11021) is a body of
work in five parts, which surprisingly have never
been shown together in their entirety; the exhibitionsets out to rectify this lapse, presenting four of
the five remaining parts. Similarly, the three works
that make up Unland are reunited for the first time
since 1998.
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This exhibition also marks the US debut of both

Salcedos immersive installation Plegaria Muda and
the largest iteration of A Flor de Piel, a floor piece
stretching roughly forty feet in length and composed entirely of treated rose petals sewn together
by hand. Finally, and particularly exciting, we are
thrilled to include the newest works to come out of
Salcedos studio, collectively titled Disremembered
(2014; pp. 19899), which continues themes that run
throughout Salcedos oeuvre but explores new materials: nickel-plated steel sewing needles and raw silk.
Given our goal of exhibiting all of Salcedos
major bodies of work, the question of how best
to represent her monumental site-specific, often
ephemeral public interventions was a primary concern. These works are highly complex and physically
and conceptually sensitive to their contexts. Our
solution was to create a documentary featuring these
massive undertakings, including Untitled (1999
2000; pp.14851), a series of three public interventions in the streets of Bogot in commemoration of
the murdered Jaime Garzn, a popular political satirist inColombia; Noviembre6 y 7 (2002; pp. 15255),
a durational piece lasting fifty-three hours wherein
empty wooden chairs were lowered from the roof
of the Colombian Palace of Justice in Bogot on
the seventeenth anniversary of a siege and resulting massacre that took place there; Untitled (2003;
pp.15659), commissioned for the 8th International
Istanbul Biennial and composed of some 1,550
chairs stacked between two buildings in an empty
either (2004; pp.16065), in which Salcedo
lot; N
first completely merged artwork and architectural
perimeter; Abyss (2005; pp. 16671), an encroaching
installation commissioned forthe Castello di Rivoli,
Turin,as part of the T1 Triennial of Contemporary
Art; Shibboleth (2007; pp. 17279), a major intervention in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London,
that involved creating a 548-foot crack in the floor
ofthe hall; Accin de Duelo (2007; pp.18083), a public, participatory intervention in Plaza de Bolvar,
Bogot; and the proposed butas of this writing
unrealized Palimpsest (2013present; p. 208).
We hope this film establishes the importance
of the public site-specific works in relation to those
Salcedo makes in her studio, and indeed, their contribution to her larger oeuvre cannot be overemphasized. In addition, the film shows how each public
work is tantamount to a public hearing of events
and concerns that government bodies, authoritative organizations, even whole cultures refuse to
acknowledge. In these public works, S
alcedos role
as an artist also takes on the complex facets of what
it means to be a citizen, performing acts of willful
remembrance and commemoration while simultaneously exposing the lack of official address.
Public action lies at the core of these largescale site-specific projects. Through them we come
to understand Salcedos concern with expanding notions of what constitutes civic space and
thecivic itself, and of the importance of the public
arena. These ideas, of course, convey an interest
in the political, which is and always has been a
fundamental aspect of Salcedos work. But perhaps
moresignificantly, these ideas suggest a sense of
responsibilitythe public responsibilityto directly
confront what many willingly veil or actively forget.
In this way, and to cast her practice in a slightly different light, Salcedos work is not so much a work of
memory as a work against amnesia. Through these
projects she gives voice to the voiceless, form to the
formless, and power to the powerless. We live in an
age of radically divergent access to a collective arena.
For Salcedo, who has personally witnessed a disintegration of public life and space and has long devoted
herself to materializing the conditions of displacement and exclusion, lending voice and visibility to
those who are denied access to the public sphere is
acentral task.
Many of these ideas are explored in the pages
of this catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition. Rather than reformulate past arguments, the
volumes insightful essays move the conversation
on Salcedos work forward, casting new light (and
new shadows) thanks to the advantage of historical
hindsight and the new perspectives gained in planning this retrospective. Julie Rodrigues Widholm, in
Presenting Absence: The Work of Doris Salcedo,
introduces the aesthetic strategies in Salcedos work,
analyzing key installations and the artists varied
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15
material choices to illuminate Salcedos philosophical, humanist, and sociopolitical concerns. Elizabeth
Adan, in Seeing Things, addresses issues of representation across Salcedos oeuvre to explore what
it means to see thingsparticularly in bodies of
work such as La Casa Viuda and Unlandmoving
along the continuum from literality to metaphor.
In her essay, Doris Salcedos Readymade Time,
Helen Molesworth reconsiders the concept of the
Duchampian readymade and recalibrates the term
inlight of the political, social, and psychological
dimensions of Salcedos production. Katherine
Brinson, in The Muted Drum: Doris Salcedos
Material Elegies, draws upon religious and elegiac
themes that figure in Salcedos recent works. Finally,
we are delighted to include a version of a text written by the artist on the occasion of receiving the 9th
Hiroshima Art Prize in 2014. It conveys the philosphical and social concerns of the artists oeuvre in
her ownwords.
As the essays by these esteemed scholars attest,
the time is ripe to look back at the career of one of
the most vital artists living today. Through her works
and in response to them, it is possible to learn something about ourselves and our communities, and the
spaces in between. Even if only for a moment, this
process of recognition brings together the individual and the community, and underscores a shared
humanity, fraught as it may be.
NOTES
1. All of these issues are germane to Salcedos work and feed
into her investigation of social death, a term used to describe
a condition wherein certain groups of people in a society are
viewed and treated as less than human.
2. Salcedos proposed public work, Palimpsest (2013present),
is designed for a large urban plot, in which drops of water slowly
give form to row upon row of the names of victims of gun
violence in the United States.
3. Stella Baraklianou, Silently Disturbing: The Political Aesthetics of Doris Salcedos Recent Installations. 2008. academia
.edu/1287796/Silently_disturbing_the_political_aesthetics_of
_Doris_Salcedos_recent_installations.
4. It is during this unique moment of beholding that the viewer
may enter, as I did, into communion with the victims experience, in Doris Salcedo and Carlos Basualdo. Interview, in
Doris Salcedo (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2000), 1718.
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17
Presenting Absence:
The Work of Doris Salcedo
The word imago designated the effigy of the absent, the

dead, and, more precisely, the ancestors: the dead from
whom we come, the links of the lineage in which each of
us is a stitch. The imago hooks into the cloth. It does not
repair the rip of their death: it does less and more than
that. It weaves. It images absence. It does not represent
this absence, it does not evoke it, it does not symbolize it,
even though all this is there too. But, essentially, it presents
absence. The absent are not there, are not in images.
Butthey are imaged: their absence is woven into our presence. The empty place of the absent as a place that is not
empty, that is the image. A place that is not empty does
not mean a place that has been filled: it means the place
of the image, that is, in the end, the image as place, and a
singular place for what has no place here: the place of a
displacement, ametaphor . . .
Jean-Luc Nancy1
In equal measure poetic and political, the work of

Colombian artist Doris Salcedo explores the paradox of simultaneously forgetting and remembering
the social scars of violent conflicts. In sculptures,
installations, and public projects, Salcedo reflects on
how once unimaginable suffering becomes abruptly
real, conveying how war just distorts . . . It throws
a shadow over your entire life.2 Her subjects are
those affected by large-scale conflict and include
not just those who are killed but also their families,
who endure the pain and suffering of absence. The
work transcends simplistic notions of victimhood to
engage more fully with the complexity of personhood wherein all people remember and forget, are
beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others.3
Salcedos thinking is influenced by philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, writers and poets
such as Paul Celan, and Holocaust survivors such as

Jean Amery. Their works provide ways to process
traumatic conditions of violence created by racism,
oppression, exclusion, poverty, and humiliation,
while Salcedos artworks consider these conditions from the distinct perspective of the victims.
Salcedo is also influenced by the work of German
artist Joseph Beuys, for whom art is inflected with
questions of how to heal after social traumas. From
the beginning of her career, Salcedo has participated in a central shift of the paradigm of political
art by embracing ideas, objecthood, and materiality
simultaneouslya substantial and early break from
the autobiographical approaches of artists associated
with 1980s multiculturalism.
Without representing violence directly, Salcedos
works make tangible both an assault on the human
body, of which death is the most extreme and horrific result, and the neverending grief experienced
by the survivor of the dead, the disappeared, the
dispossessed. Many of her projects begin with a
violent event that Salcedo has witnessed or encountered in the media. Although her research involves
the collection of witness statements and personal
testimonies from victims and their family members,
specific narrative details are unseen in her finished
works.4 Her restrained yet emotive works employ
forms and materials that relate to the victims stories
and make use of ordinary objects available to marginalized populations: chairs, tables, beds, armoires,
and clothing. The simple unadorned wooden furniture in Salcedos work serves as a universal image
that is not meant to be specific to a particular time
or place. Her subdued palette of browns, grays, and
shades of white derives from the use of wood, metal,
concrete, and bricks, occasionally mixed with organic
materials such as hair, animal fiber, live grass, roses,
and silk. Through a laborious process that can take
years of research, testing, and production, Salcedo
and her team of assistants transform these familiar
materials into contemplative objects that transcend
the particular details of violent incidents and prompt
viewers to consider individual lives lost and families
torn apart. Her installations remind us of the risk to
humanity when the loss of our most disenfranchised
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18
is not properly marked or mourned and when victims

become mere statistics or headlines. Locating the
effects of war within areas of daily life, both private
and public, Salcedos work includes sculptures made
of deconstructed furniture filled with concrete
symbolic of the relentlessly disrupted domestic
sphereas well as large-scale, site-specific installations and public actions.
Though most of Salcedos works are untitled,
those that are named are given titles that succinctly
imbue the work with poetic impact and evocative
associations: Unland, Tenebrae, Abyss, Neither, Shibboleth, Palimpsest, Disremembered. Other titles are in
Spanish and resist direct translation into English,
forexample, Atrabiliarios, La Casa Viuda, Plegaria
Muda, and A Flor de Piel. Works such as Noviembre 6
y 7 reference the dates of specific events affiliated
with Salcedos public actions, including those she
calls accin de duelo, or acts of mourning.
During the last thirty years, Salcedowho is
from Bogot and continues to live and work there
has considered what it means to make art during
a time of war. Colombia is the country with the
longest-running civil conflict in the Western Hemisphere, where fifty years of internal battles between
the government, guerrillas, and paramilitaries have
together killed more than 220,0005 people and displaced more than four million. Notions of presence
and absence on a global scale take on highly charged
political meanings when considered in the context
of Colombia and other regions of South America,
where the violent and widespread phenomenon
of the disappeared (desaparecidos)6 has created a
culture characterized by profound loss. Salcedos
artwork counters acts of disappearance with acts of
re-appearance. Her work does not document tragic
events through representational means but instead
embodies the struggle for presence and visibility,
and a quest for agency.
Salcedos oeuvre diverges from centuries of
paintings and sculptures about war that rely on
depictions of the figure. Instead, her research, processes, and art refute notions of representation by
signaling the futility of such attempts. She embraces
the abstract as an essential tool for art making. This
is another crucial element of the artists workher

decision not to address violence through depictions
of battle scenes, victims, or gore, but instead to
plumb the emotional and psychological textures
of loss, grief, and other aftereffects of violence.
The work, by the artists own admission, is like a
funeraloration.7
Salcedo states, there is nothing more human
than mourning; it restores humanity.8 The artist
approaches this subject from a broad viewher
themes include loss of life, self, safety, the familiar,
the family, and home. Like Salcedo, the sociologist
Paul Gilroy expanded the idea of mourning beyond
notions of death when he wrote: In Latin America,
postcolonial life supplies an invitation to mourn the
losses involved in subjugation and to imagine what
another, less belligerent developmental journey
might have involved.9 Given the difficult conditions
of life for the vast majority of the human population,
one imagines this invitation could be extended outside of Colombia to other subjugated regions. Thus,
Salcedos works serve as a catalyst for dynamic internal reflection and public dialogue about trauma and
suffering in many times and places.
Indeed, war, violence, and their effects have
become a condition of everyday life for many, and a
persistent fact of our time: one only has to think of
the conflagrations brewing across the globe at the
time of this writing in Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Ukraine, and Nigeria, as well as within many American inner cities. Salcedo addresses the omnipresence
of war when she states:
I believe war is the main event of our time. War
is what defines our lives . . . it creates its own
laws. War forces us to generate ethical codes
which exclude whole parts of the population;
once this happens, we can attack and destroy
them because they are no longer viewed as
human, and we have used these false ethics as
a tool to expel people from humankind. We see
civil wars happening everywhere, every day. We
read about these terrible events that shape the
way we live. What I am trying to show in my
work is that waris part of our everyday life.10
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19
The seemingly infinite number of conflicts

around the globe and the neverending loss of individuals are echoed in Salcedos work through an
aesthetic strategy that emphasizes a repetition of
forms with subtle variations, as if to acknowledge
the individual among the masses. And yet, despite
the t wenty-four-hour torrent of media images bearing witness to extraordinary pain, suffering, and loss
around the globe, Salcedo suggests that as a society
we have developed an inability to mourn.11 In
order to mourn, one must negate apathy toward
others and empathetically feel their loss so that
it may become our loss as well. Through highly
crafted sculptures and installations, her work offers
an imageand a space to conjure feelings and subsequently a public platform that forges this sense of
collective human connection.
Salcedos work highlights two particular characteristics of war and grief: in the sculptural work, the
relentless disruption to the domestic sphere; and
in public actions and site-specific installations, the
traditionally private act of mourning in the collective
realm. In both cases, the work embodies the victims perspective and experience of war. By viewing
Salcedos work relative to the consequences of fear
and hate,12 one is forced to reflect on the irregular,
transitory and sometimes unwanted news of how it
is to be another human being13 whose life has been
distorted by pervasive violence. If mourning restores
humanity, and Salcedos sculptures create sites for
mourning, then she creates art that counters dehumanizing acts with humane ones. In the face of the
widespread injustice and suffering that accompany
systemic violence, Salcedos work creates spaces
where we can reaffirm life by confrontingseeing,
hearing, and acknowledgingthe other. In doing so,
it is both urgent and timeless.
According to political theorist Fredric Jameson,
History is not something we can know directly;
it is available to the scholar only as a c ombination
of traces or wounds. It can be apprehended only
through its effects.14 Within the modern era
defined by industrialization, colonization and
decolonization, world wars and genocide, destruction and rebuilding, democracy and dictatorships,
excessive prosperity and excessive povertyit is in

part through the work of artists such as Salcedo that
we can begin to understand Jamesons traces and
wounds, the traumatic results, both physical and
psychological, of sociopolitical events.
Salcedos response to conflict, comprising
interrelated bodies of work and public installations,
proposes that art transcends matters of fact and
moves toward the ineffable. Her work contemplates
the visual and metaphorical forms of presence and
absence: it defines absence beyond notions of life
and death to include the invisibility of certain sectors
of society, the disqualified, marginalized, fugitive
knowledge from below and outside the institutions
of official knowledge production.15 This is just one
way to understand how Salcedos political concerns
undergird her artistic practice. In addition, the paradox of an absent body that makes its presence felt
is central to Salcedos work, specifically the notion
of agency for those who are socially or politically
invisiblethe refugee, the immigrant, the widow,
the person on the receiving end of violence.16
These concerns are also manifested in the physical construction of the sculptures. Her ambitious
sculptures and installations demonstrate the skill
and ability of those working in peripheral regions
such as Bogot and serve as a reminder that technically complex and intellectually rigorous projects
can be accomplished in developing countries. The
works have an uncanny sense of effortlessness that
belies the fact that each project requires an extraordinary amount of human labor to overcome the
seemingly impossible through innovation, invention,problem-solving, and extremely sophisticated
modes ofproduction.
Salcedos first solo exhibition took place at
Bogots Casa de Moneda in 1985, soon after she
completed her studies in art at Universidad de
Bogot Jorge Tadeo Lozano (1980) and New York
University (1984). Featured in the exhibition
were seven sculptures made with metal rods, wax,
leather, and wire that she created while in graduate
school. The works include examples of wrapping
and embedding materials, techniques that persist in
much of her subsequent work. By 1987, Salcedo had
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20
Installation view, XXXI Saln Nacional de Artistas Colombianos,

Antiguo Aeropuerto Olaya Herrera, Medelln, Colombia, 1987
begun creating her mature work, including Untitled

(1986; pp. 4245), for which she was awarded first
prize in the XXXISaln Nacional de Artistas Colombianos in Medelln. A group of sculptures made from
altered hospital furniture comprised her work for the
Saln. In Untitled (1986), Salcedo welded the head
and foot of a white steel cot to black steel shelving
that had been deconstructed and reconfigured. She
covered ten small plastic baby dolls in wax and
wrapped them with animal fiber around the joints
of the sculpture. The dolls are barely visible but
suggest a life that is confined and distorted early in
its development. Indeed, her use of hospital furniture evokes notions of physical repair and healing.
Intentionally avoiding a clear narrative and honing
apostminimal aesthetic, Salcedo was thinking of the
drug cartels forcedconscription of poor boys from
Medelln as hired assassins, known in Spanish as
sicarios, when making this work.17
For the Medelln exhibition, Salcedo also
physically transformed the surfaces and colors of
found objects. She applied acids to a gynecological chair, while a wooden chest was put outside
to weather and dust. These aggressive processes
of entropy reference the transformation of life in
Colombia that occurred while she was studying
abroad, during which time violence seemed to have
grown unchecked.18 In an interview at the time
of the exhibition, Salcedo mentioned the importance of the symbolic traits carried by her found
materials. The plastic dolls, cradles, and childrens

furniture deployed in her work suggest the moment
of c hildhood when life should be full of promise
but instead is marred by a particular sociopolitical
event or condition. What became clear in this early
exhibition was Salcedos engagement with familiar
yet cryptic forms that circulate between the absence
of information and the presence of meaning. It also
established the significance of presenting her work
as installations, an approach she has used to great
effect throughout her career, to explore the relationships among individual sculptures, and also between
the sculptures and the architecture of the gallery,
inclusive of the latters social and political structures.
A massacre of workers taken from their homes
at banana plantations in northern Colombia in 1988
provided the impetus for a group of eleven untitled
sculptures from 198990 (pp. 4647, 5055) presented in Salcedos next solo exhibition, which was
held at Galera Garcs Velsquez in Bogot. Individual stacks of white button-down shirts solidified
with plaster are pierced with varying numbers of
steel rebar. In this work, a wifes act of ironing and
stacking shirts, a quiet ritual of everyday domestic
life, is reified into a condition of futile mourning.
The works appeared in a row along with six hospital cots, four on the floor and two leaning against a
wall, which, like her earlier hospital pieces, were
wrapped in animal viscera, used to attach shirts
onto the grid of the cot like a cocoon. The strong
juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical forms, which
the artist begins here, is explored throughout her
later work, perhaps as a metaphor for horizontal
(democratic) social structures encountering vertical
(hierarchical)systems.
Salcedos interviews with displaced rural Colombian women forced out of their homes in search
of safety resulted in La Casa Viuda, a series of six
sculptures (one of which, La Casa Viuda V, is no longer extant) made from 1992 to 1995. Doors without
buildings, unmoored from their foundations, evoke
the loss of home and subsequent lack of shelter
that these women and their families were forced to
endure. La casa viuda, or the widowed house, is
also a phrase used to describe homes affected by los
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21
desaparecidos. La Casa Viuda I (199294; pp.11011)

is composed of a tall and narrow dark wood door with
a frame still attached. The left side of the doorframe
transitions from lumber at the top to raw, knotty
wood toward the base, revealing the traces of severed branches. The work becomes a throne of sorts,
an ennobling gesture that carries a sense of fortitude
and dignity in its verticality. What looks like a formal lace dress, perhaps a wedding dress, has been
meticulously embedded within the surface of half
a wooden bench or stool that is affixed to the door.
The neckline is located upside down near the feet,
and seems to dissolve into the front and top surface
before hanging loosely behind the seat. The memory of being a bride fades into the wood, overtaken
by the unalterable condition of widowhood, a state
defined by absence.
The installation of La Casa Viuda I and La Casa
Viuda III (1994; pp. 11617), often within tight
doorways, underscores how these abandoned doors
are missing their architectural support. In La Casa
ViudaIII, a small bedframes headboard and footboard span either side of a narrow corridor. In La
Casa Viuda II (199394; pp. 11215), a similarly narrow but paler wooden door is attached to a wooden
cabinet that is open on one side to reveal its interior,
empty except for a few shelf supports. On its exterior, plaid clothing and a zipper are visible along with
a piece of bone that is delicately inlaid into its surface. The traces of an absent architectural structure,
perhaps an exterior wall, are suggested in La Casa
Viuda II by the broken L-shaped line of wood on the
floor. La Casa ViudaIV (1994; pp. 11819) continues
the formal exploration begun in La Casa Viuda III,
with two small portions of a dark wooden headboard
and footboard, a single bed, extending like arms
from part of an architectural remnant also inlaid with
white lace and bone and missing its glass windows.
The work borrows a gallery wall for its support,
emphasizing its itinerant nature. Salcedos material
investigations continued with La Casa Viuda V (1994)
(which was later destroyed by the artist), and La
Casa Viuda VI (1995; pp. 12021), the last work in
the series, comprises three free-standing sculptures
made of a shorter horizontal base and taller vertical
La Casa Viuda II (detail), 199394. Wooden door, wooden cabinet, wood, steel, clothing, and bone. Four parts, overall: 102
3138 23 in. (259.7 79.7 60.3 cm)
door. A pair of doors are huddled together and set

apart from the third sculpture, which contains a
childs toy metal chair, held by the curvilinear support of two human ribs. The chairs disturbing form
and heart-wrenching emptiness remind us again of
how violence upends families through a loss of familiarity and innocence.
For nearly twenty years, from 1989 to 2008,
Salcedo explored various visual permutations of
concrete-filled wooden armoires, dressers, beds,
and chairshousehold furniture that was donated,
purchased, or found, and then rendered dysfunctional by infilling with concrete. Some of the works
included furniture and clothing provided by victims
and families she encountered during her research, as
material evidence of those who are absent. Through
years of refinement the concrete surfaces in these
works have become smoother, more monochromatic,
and more controlled while the furniture components
have become larger and more complicated.
Salcedos work includes many examples of
different objects that are joined or embedded
sometimes seamlessly, sometimes jarringlywithin
or partially inside or outside of each other. Meta
phors for episodes of violence, these works are out
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22
ofjoint and dislocated. This vocabulary of oppositionis most notable in the concrete furniture
piecesher most expansive body of work spanning
the largest period of outputfor example, Untitled
(1995; pp. 7073), in which an armoire intersects a
bed frame, creating a strong sense of vertical and
horizontal forms. A chair fades, or perhaps emerges
from the surface as if to demand presence in Untitled
(2007; pp. 8485). Other sculptures in this body of
work include soft and pliable white floral fabric,
once clothing, that has been made rigid with concrete, forever entombed and only partially visible.
They are like memories inevitably receding yet
constantly recalled by the smallest detail: a shirt,
achair, asmell.
In Salcedos sculptures and installations, familiarhousehold elements used in everyday life become
specters of the familiar, suggesting transformations
that occur when ones life is irrevocably altered.
Sociologist Avery Gordon has described those
instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when
your bearings on the world lose direction, when the
over-and-done-with comes alive . . . as haunting ...
The whole essence of a ghost is that it has a real
presence and demands its due, your attention.19
This ghost furthermore is a symptom of what is
missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to
what it represents . . . usually a loss, sometimes of
life, sometimes of a path not taken . . . and we must
reckon with it out of a concern for justice.20
This sense of haunting and displacement,
however, could pertain equally to a different and
profound experience of the world brought about by
suffering, trauma, or loss resulting from the fear of,
and hostility toward, difference, otherness, and the
unknown. Salcedos work gives presence to those
who cannot escape oppressive states of being that
prevent a fully lived, humane life because they
live on the economic, geographical, and political
peripheries. Salcedo locates art as a contact zone for
difference: The experience of the victim is something presenta reality that resounds within the
silence ofeach human being that gazes upon it. It
is because of this that the work of art preserves life,
offering possibility that an intimacy develops in a
human being when he or she receives something

of the experience of another. Art sustains the possibility of an encounter between people who come
from quite distinct realities.21 As such, one may
consider through Salcedos work how certain critical
and empathetic faculties can be useful in negotiating
encounters with the unfamiliar.
A person exiled, whether from his or her home
or country, inhabits a liminal state. Inspired byJewish Romanian poet Paul Celans neologisms, Salcedo
coined her own term, unland, to describe the sense of
being displaced. She used this as a title for a series of
sculptures that she made after meeting rural Colombian orphans who had witnessed the murder of their
parents. In Unland: the orphans tunic (1997; pp.122
27)one of three sculptures that form the complete
Unland installation (199598; pp. 12223)22parts
of two tables, one covered in white silk and one
made of brown wood, join together at the seam.
An abundance of strands of human hair have been
sewn through holes drilled into the surface of the
tables. The work suggests that something broken
has the potential to become healed through contact.
Each table that is missing legs depends on another
for its stability. The work recalls observations by
Trinh T. Minh-ha: Difference is not otherness....
difference implies the interdependency of these
two-sided feminist gestures: that of affirming I am
like you while pointing insistently to the difference,
and that reminding I am different while unsettling
every definition of otherness arrived at.23 Although
the transitions between materials in Salcedos work
nearly always remain evident, the effort to connect,
even via the most delicate of fabrics or hair, reveals
meaning in the joining together of disparate entities
in a moment of fragile coexistence.
In Salcedos hands, sewing, or puncturing, is a
gesture of repair and healing as well as wounding.
She used surgical thread for the first time to suture
shoes in wall niches behind stretched and dried
animal fiber in the haunting installation Atrabiliarios (19922004; pp. 10209); and more recently
had hundredsof thousands of rose petals sutured
together tocreate a massive undulating bloodred shroud on the floor in A Flor de Piel (2014;
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23
pp.19293). Puncturing carries strong resonances

in Salcedos work: iron rebar pierces white stacks
of work shirts, andseemingly against all odds
grass pushes through tiny holes in table surfaces in
Plegaria Muda (200810; pp. 18491).
Plegaria Muda, which translates loosely to
silent prayer, is a variable installation composed
of wooden tables handmade in Salcedos studio to
look weathered and aged. Slightly different types of
tables created for the installation, and approximately
the size of a human-sized coffin, are inverted atop
another with what appears to be a thick layer of soil
between them. Grass seeds are planted within this
layer and blades of grass grow through tiny holes
perforating the surface of the overturned table. The
installationconfigured to fill a gallery space with
a vast field of table-graveswas inspired in part
by the discovery of mass graves in the Colombian
countryside. It was also informed by the murder of
2,500 confirmed cases of poor young men, lured to
their deaths by false job offers. Their bodies were
deceptively presented as captured guerillas killed
in combat by Colombian army units seeking bounties. Salcedo, who accompanied a group of mothers
of these disappeared to find their bodies, suggests
in Plegaria Muda that a crucial part of the grieving
process for the families of victims can occur only
when the bodies have been identified and properly
buried. The delicate blades of grass growing from
within, seeking light and life by pushing through
thesurface of the tables, evoke both a renewal
of lifeand the painful cruelty of continuing as if
everything were normal when it is not. Plegaria
Muda was also informed by Salcedos research into
gang violence inLos Angeles in 2004. From this
research into social death or death-in-life, a
condition in which p
eople are not considered fully
human nor afforded the same rights as others, she
began to explore the oscillation between victim
andperpetrator.
In a world full of visual noise, viewers are
confronted by various modes of silence evoked by
the gravitas of Salcedos work because in essence
there are no words to adequately address victims
experiences. Salcedos distinctly subdued forms
A Flor de Piel (test fragment), 2012
emphasize how silence, modesty, and quietude have

proven to be effective strategies within many political art practices. Her work is not activism. In fact,
to the contrary, the artist speaks about her work as
hopeless actions that cannot change reality, and in
its silence symbolizes our inability to solve profound
crises. It resides firmly within the realm of art and
resists overt political statements in favor of more
abstract artistic cues.24
While Salcedo engages with many facets of
political and aesthetic silence, her attention to the
quiet dimensions of collective mourning can be
seen most directly in her large-scale, site-specific
public interventions that become ephemeral sites
ofremembrance. Such sites have been a central
focus in her work during the last fifteen years. Her
first such project, mounted between 19992000
(pp.14851), which shecalls accin de duelo (act of
mourning), commemorates the murder of the prominent Colombian journalist, political satirist, lawyer,
and peace activist Jaime Garzn with three separate but related actions. Only days after his death,
Salcedo and her collaborator Victor Laignelet created
a single row of fresh red roses nailed upside down to
a wall a block from Garzns home; a second action
a few days later included multiple rows of roses on
the same wall, and on the one-year anniversary of
his death a third action occurred: a 2-mile path of
single roses tied together that began at his home
12/12/14 1:24 PM
24
and ended at the site where he was killed. Here the

relationship between time and memory becomes an
important area of investigation in Salcedos work.
A few years after, Salcedo staged Noviembre 6 y
7 (2002; pp. 15255), and later Accin de Duelo (2007;
pp. 18083), both of which addressed traumatic
political events with temporary large-scale public artworks. At 11:35am on November 6, 1985, t hirty-five
M-19 guerrilla rebels stormed the Colombian Palace
of Justice in Bogot. In an attempt to demand that
then-president Belisario Betancur stand trial, the
rebels took three hundred hostages. The Colombian army launched a full-scale brutal assault in an
effort to retake the building from the guerillas. More
than one hundred people died, including guerrillas
and hostages. An additional twelve people joined
the ranks of the disappeared. Eleven Supreme
Court justices were killed before the siege ended
fifty-three hours later on November 7. Seventeen
years later, as a public response to these events and
their aftereffects, Salcedo enacted Noviembre 6 y 7
by slowly lowering 280 wooden chairs from the roof
of the Palace of Justice starting at precisely the date
and time ofthe siege, and over the same duration
and tempo as the original event, as if the building
(reconstructed in 2000) was besieged again by
this memory.
Salcedo uses the dates of this siege to title her
artwork, locating the piece as an incontrovertible
record of a historic event, not unlike Goyas Second
ofMay 1808 (1814), which commemorated the
human toll of war. As she has stated, her work is not
rooted in imagination or fiction.25 Facts and testimonies offer a path beyond the numbingly anonymous
statistics of loss, disappearance, and death, into a
pyschogeography that connects the personal to the
universal. Although she used specific dates in the
title of Noviembre 6 y 7, no dates or documentary
images are visible in the artworks themselves to tell
the stories of those who died. The charged history of
its site, along with the works title, are the contextual
clues that point to the meaning of the work.
This action was a major transition for Salcedo
toward the large-scale public projects that continue
to occupy her. Salcedos artistic research into the
siege of November 6 and 7 began in the mid-1990s,

however,and was first utilized in her installation
Tenebrae Noviembre 7, 1985 (19992000; pp. 13639),26
which was also the first time she used raw materials
(lead and steel), instead of found objects.27 Here,
lead chairs are overturned, their legs and backs
elongated to reach across the entire room from wall
to wall, creating an impenetrable barrier of diagonal
lines on either side of a doorway. The work is an
early example of how the architecture of a space
becomes an integral part of Salcedos works. Noviembre 6 (2001; pp. 14041) was another sculptural
translation of the violence of this event using empty,
distorted chairs fabricated in steel, lead, wood, and
resin to stand in for those lost that day. Slightly
anthropomorphic in their arrangement, one chair is
presented off to the side, alone, while the others are
grouped together in a tight huddle.
Salcedos ambitious site-specific responses to
political events and socioeconomic histories are
often realized in seemingly impossible material
feats. The untitled installation for the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003; pp. 15659) contained
1,550 common wooden chairs piled within the space
of a vacant lot between two buildings in the citys
Persembe Pazari neighborhood. Its uncanny flat
facade belies an internal chaos that signifies thecollapse of logic and order. She envisioned the installation as a topography of war, a mapping of life
turned upside down by conflict, with people caught
in the violent crosshairs of opposing viewpoints. Various hues of simple brown are intertwined in a solid
mass of chairs, a reflection, perhaps, of how Istanbul
itself is a charged site of divergent perspectives
and diverse peoples from Asia, Europe, the Middle
East, and North Africa. With this work, the image
of thewall, the fence, or blockade became a visual
and conceptual focal point within the artists practice
to examine how, space is a fundamental category
for any form of power as stated by German curator
Anselm Franke, and Salcedo elaborates architecture represents its potency, its social order and its
objectives.28
Neither (2004; pp. 16065) also relied upon a
specific architectural space, this time to delineate a
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25
Gallery view, Castello di Rivoli Museo dArte Contemporanea, Turin
Abyss, 2005. Brick, concrete, steel, and epoxy resin. 17358

54558 63938 in. (441 1386 1624 cm). Installation view,
T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli Museo dArte
Contemporanea, Turin, 2005
sense of being inside barriers to freedom.29 Drywall

with wire fencing inlaid at varying depths surround
the viewer. The diagonal patterned fencingappears
and disappears, at times darkening into a geometric
shape near the ceiling and floor. The work represents
an important shift toward spatial immersion within
Salcedos installations. The fencing extends into the
viewers space most directly as it frames the entrance
to the gallery, an invitation to experience an essentially empty space. Neither reflects the artistsongoing research into concentration camps and detention
centers, suchas Guantnamo Bay, specifically what
she considers those aspects of society that make
possible the existence of spaces where absolutely
inhumane conditions are accomplished. . . . And
the perverse ambiguity that characterizes these
spaces, where destitute human beings are included
in territories that represent their absolute exclusion
fromsociety.30
Salcedo followed this investigation of spaces of
isolation and exclusion, and how architecture is a
manifestation of social structures, with Abyss (2005;
pp. 16671), a site-specific work at the Castello di
Rivoli for the first edition of the Turin Triennial in
Italy. After repeated visits to Turinthe capital of
the Arte Povera movement in the 1960s and the site
of postwar Fiat manufacturingand researching
various histories and social policies within the region,
including the royal use of Castello di Rivoli and the

large-scale influx of workers from the south, Salcedo
was inspired to use brick as her material, a reference
to a brick-clad migrant detention center that resides
visibly, yet, for many residents, invisibly, in the center of the city, and by extension, contemporary slave
labor in Italy and Europe. In her studio in Bogot,
Salcedo created brick walls that extended one of
Castello di Rivolis eighteenth-century vaulted brick
ceilings toward the floor. Quite unusually, the resulting installation appears to be built top down, instead
of bottom up, seeming to float only two or three feet
from the ground, and allowing small slivers of natural
light to punctuate the space. These purposefully
uncomfortable spaces created an empathic physical
experience of oppression and near-entombment
approaching the perspective of those for whom
the crushing weight of power and domination is
inescapable.
The exertion of power that deprives a person
of his or her humanity and the seeming indifference
of museum space, with its implacable geometry, are
addressed in Shibboleth (2007; pp. 17279), Salcedos
Turbine Hall Commission at Tate Modern, London.
In the work, absence takes the form of a 548-foot
long crack in the vast halls concrete floor, a physical fissure or void that evokes social and economic
chasms based on race, language, or culture. Salcedo
12/12/14 1:24 PM
26
created a distinctive negative space, a monumental puncture in the museums surface. The term
shibboleth refers to a word or custom that is used to
distinguish an insider from an outsider, and Salcedo writes, Social death is the legacy of racism,
and it means removing a person from humankind;
it is to deprive a person of humanity.31 Or, as
Jean-Luc Nancy explained, At the extreme limit
of the crime against humanity, we must learn to
discern not only persecution and liquidation on the
grounds of ethnicity, religion, and so on, but persecution and liquidation also on the grounds of the
representation of an attack on authentic presence:
I exterminate you because you infect the body and
the face of humanity.32 Earlier in the same year as
Shibboleth and four days after the announcement on
June 29 that FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia) murdered eleven members of the state
parliament from Valle, Colombia, who had been held
hostage for five years,Salcedo responded with Accin
de Duelo, placing twenty-four thousand candles in
Bogots Plaza de Bolivar, with the assistance of
hundreds of people.
Salcedos recent large-scale work in progress,
Palimpsest (2013present; p. 208), is a proposal for
an outdoor work that gives presence to those who
have been killed by gun violence in the United
States. This project began with research into
violence and areas of social death in Chicago.
Salcedo interviewed mothers in the city who had
lost children togun violence. Their conversations
about the pain of their grief informed Salcedos
project, whichdeveloped into a proposal for a site
for collective mourning of victims of gun violence
in the United States. In this work, Salcedo significantly uses text for the first time, specifically victims names. In the artists words, Palimpsest seeks
to actualize the act of naming the victims of gun
violence as a way to establish contact with painful
and, maybe for this reason, neglected memories.
Naming the victims is a way to acknowledge the
immensity of the loss suffered not only by their
families but also by all of us as a society.33 Asproposed within a vacant city lot, rows of victims
names emerge in water from underground onto a
gray custom concrete-compound surface, a persistentyet ghostly presence. As the watery names
form, they obscure a layer of names painted faintly
on thesurface. One can imagine that on some days
environmental conditions such as wind and rain
would dishevel the names formed in water. Salcedo
says, . . . both remembering and forgetting are
equally p
resent in Palimpsest. A work of art must be
able to take in its center opposite experiences.34
Salcedos most recent work, Disremembered I (2014;
pp.19899), reflects a shift toward different materials, and embodies this contradiction in a tunic
that is impossible to wear. Sewn with raw silk and
more than 12,000 needles, it is simultaneously soft
and hard, appearing and disappearing. Salcedo has
made a symbolic hair shirt, and perhaps a call for
penance, for those whose indifference to victims
bringsadditional pain to those in the fragile state
of mourning.
Salcedos work compels a critical reading of the
seemingly familiar, a place at the edge of seeing and
knowing, which slowly fades into the unfamiliar,
with a constant oscillation between the two. As an
exemplar for the merging of the political and the
poetic, Salcedos sculptures and installations are
crafted slowly over time and finely tuned to honor
the act of making and the slow process of looking.
Jean-Luc Nancy writes, Connotation borders on
denotations, and, embroiders its borders. It is there
that the image arises. . . . Making an image means
producing a relief, a protrusion, a trait, a presence.
Above all, the image gives presence.35 In Salcedos
work, her sculptures point and sense instead of
depict. They demonstrate that victims of violence
and oppression are so much more than a shibboleth of difference. Absence and presence, visibility
and invisibility on a global scale are often reflected
through schisms of perceived knowledge. The marginalized or discounted populations for whom the
production of knowledge is made invisible, made
disappeared, are defiantly made present within her
work. Salcedo negates apathy toward others and
instead invites us to experience empathy, reminding
us of our common humanity through our bodies and
our everyday rituals: folding clean shirts, sitting in
12/12/14 1:24 PM
27
chairs around a table, caring for our delicate skin.

Salcedo asks us to consider how the rituals and
spaces of mourning, which is to say how we honor
death, might also unite us in honoring life.
NOTES
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2005), 6768.
2. Doris Salcedo: Variations on Brutality, By Susan Sollins,
Art21.org, April 2013, art21.org/texts/doris-salcedo/interview
-doris-salcedo-variations-on-brutality.
3. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008),4.
4. When speaking about the interviews with trauma survivors
that shape her work, Salcedo frequently uses the nouns witness
and testimony as if to suggest a context in which justice is being
sought, even though the artist has made it clear that seeking
justice is not the impetus of her work.
5. Colombian Conflict Has Killed 220,000 in 55 Years, Commission Finds, The Guardian, July 25, 2013, theguardian.com/
world/2013/jul/25/colombia-conflict-death-toll-commission.
6. This term refers to forced disappearance, in which victims
are abducted, and often tortured and murdered. Such disappearances leave no body to prepare for burial or evidence of
thevictims death.
7. Doris Salcedo, acceptance speech for the 9th Hiroshima
Art Prize (Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art,
Hiroshima, July 18, 2014). See also Salcedos essay in this
publication.
8. Ibid.
9. Paul Gilroy, Brokenness, Division and the Moral Topography
of Post-Colonial Worlds, in Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, ed. Achim
Borchardt-Hume (London: Tate Modern, 2007), 28.
10. Sollins, Doris Salcedo.
11. See Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. The Inability to
Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press,
1975).
12. Curator Achim Borchardt-Hume uses the work of French
philosopher Jacques Rancire to make this point; see BorchardtHume, Salcedo: Shibboleth, 21.
13. Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2011), 144.
14. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as
Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981),
102.
15. Gordon, xviii.
16. Doris Salcedo, Hiroshima Art Prize lecture, July 19, 2014.
17. Doris Salcedo in discussion with the author, May 20, 2014.
18. Ibid., July 31, 2010.
19. Gordon, xvi.
20. Ibid., 64.
21. Interview with Charles Merewether 1998, in Doris Salcedo,
eds. Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo, and Andreas Huyssen
(London: Phaidon, 2000), 137.
22. For a comprehensive description of all three tables, see

Tanya Barson, Unland: The Place of Testimony, Tate Papers1,
April 1, 2004, tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/
unland-place-testimony.
23. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Questions of Images and Politics, The
Independent (Film and Video Monthly) 10, no. 4 (May 1987), 2123.
24. Addressing political silence was the main thrust of the work
of Gran Fury, who came to the fore in the 1980s at the same
time as Salcedo. The collectives SILENCE=DEATH campaign
drew a connection between the AIDS crisis and the Holocaust,
even appropriating the pink triangle that was used in Nazi
concentration camps to mark gay prisoners. But the message
was clear that the political silence surrounding the AIDS crisis
in the 1980s directly affected the ability of patients to receive
life-saving treatment. Furthermore, given the then-shameful
silencing of lovers, public mourning became a form of activism.
See Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in
Contemporary Art (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University
Press, 2013), 132.
25. Segment: Doris Salcedo in Compassion, pbs.org,
October7, 2009, pbs.org/art21/watch-now/segment-doris
-salcedo-in-compassion.
26. The evocative term tenebrae, Latin for shadows or darkness
and also the title of a Paul Celan poem, refers to a Christian
ceremony held the week before Easter Sunday to commemorate
Christs death before his resurrection.
27. Doris Salcedo in discussion with the author, July 31, 2010.
28. Doris Salcedo, Hiroshima Art Prize lecture, July 19, 2014.
29. Originally presented at White Cube London, Neither is
permanently housed in a custom pavilion at Inhotim in Belo
Horizonte, Brazil.
30. Salcedo, Proposal for a Project for White Cube, London,
2004, Salcedo: Shibboleth, 109.
31. Salcedo, Proposal for a Project for the Palace of Justice,
Bogot, 2002, in Salcedo: Shibboleth, 8283.
32. Nancy, 41.
33. Salcedo, unpublished proposal for Palimpsest (201314).
34. Ibid.
35. Nancy, 6667.
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12/12/14 1:24 PM
29
Seeing Things
Elizabeth Adan
Over the course of its relatively short existence,

contemporary art history has grown exponentially
as a field. At the same time, it has become an object
of study, with considerable attention focused on the
incongruities that can seem to permeate, and potentially even destabilize, the field.1 Perhaps most obvious is the apparent contradiction between present
and past implied in the very phrase contemporary
art history, along with related concerns that art and
cultural production of the current moment are generated at an ever more rapid pace, while the work
of researching and writing about these objects of
study occurs more slowly.2 In addition, some authors
have questioned the feasibility of what for many
remains a central objective, to resist and intervene
in the seemingly all-encompassing market forces
associated with the global proliferation of capitalism
and its attendant visual forms, in what Guy Debord
has termed the society of the spectacle.3 At least
one further set of potentially conflicting concerns
has also shaped art and cultural production since the
postwar era: tensions around the viability of representation, especially in the face of theories of unrepresentability in art and culture that have developed
with the spread of political violence and terror in
theworld.
Together, these manifold issues could suggest
that the field of contemporary art history is riddled
with conflicts and inconsistencies. More important,
though, as several authors have noted, such debates
point to determined efforts to comprehend, or at
least indicate, the full complexity of visual practices
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Indeed, for a number of authors, these issues, with
their apparent incongruities and potential contradictions, in fact constitute the field of contemporary
arthistory.4
There is also another matter to consider, one
that may initially appear to be relatively minor but
that is likely to become increasingly at issue in contemporary art history and that is central to the work
of Doris Salcedo. In examining practices such as
Salcedos, which emerged at the moment, in the late
1980s and 1990s, often aligned with a historical shift
to contemporaneity,5 and which have since continued to play a role in contemporary art, how does one
actually locate the contemporaneity ofsuch practices? To put it another way, how does one contend
with an artist whose work has been contemporary
for, say, twenty-plus years?
In Salcedos case, the subjects that she addresses,
as well as the materials and techniques that she uses,
continue from her early projects in the late 1980s
and 1990s into the present day. But, again, how does
one account for the span of contemporaneity in
Salcedos work? Does one consign the earlier work
tothe past and historicize it, reserving the word
contemporary for the chronologically more recent
work? Does one assert that the contemporaneity
of certain developments extends well beyond the
moment of their emergence? Or, does one trace the
nascent history of certain concerns that emerged
during the period termed contemporary with an
eye to the perhaps subtle, but no less consequential,
shifts one might find within such concerns since
their initial development?
It is a combination of these latter two approaches
that I take in this examination of the artists sculptures and installations. For more than twenty years,
Salcedo has investigated the individual experiences,
social conditions, and lasting impacts of political
violence and terror, as well as the challenges that
such matters pose for visual art and representation.
She is especially known for projects that explore the
ways in which, as a result of such violence, victims
vanish, leaving a profound absence and sense of
instability in the world; above all, the artists works
have insistently attempted to counter these effects.
As has been widely noted, however, nowhere in her
work does the artist depict, document, or otherwise
include pictorial imagery of victims or their experiences of violence. Instead, at the same time that
Salcedo has committed to making victims and their
experiences present and evident, she has placed
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30
equal emphasis on their absence and invisibility.

As a result, the artist has consistently engaged with
political violence and its victims in ways that resist
traditional, and above all visual, approaches to
representation.6
In recent years, such issues, typically consideredcentral to Salcedos sculpture and installation
projects, have increasingly come under reconsideration. What is more, in spite of her rejection of
pictorial imagery and related conventions of representation, seeingand above all, seeing thingsis
fundamental to Salcedos work. I will thus explore
her artworks, in their past as well as their present
(and perhaps also their future) contemporaneity,
through three intersecting modes of seeing things
that operate throughout Salcedos projects: first
in the sense of Am I seeing things?, meaning
an experience of visual discrepancy or confusion
in which one seems to see something that is not
visibly present; second, a more prosaic sense of seeing things that are empirically present and visually
apparent; and third, things that themselves have
visual capacities, meaning things that see.
It is the first sense of seeing things that has
been most widely examined in the artists work,
beginning with her projects in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Given that victims of political violence
are all too often absent and invisible, and that their
experiences of torture, disappearance, and related
crimes are by some accounts altogether unrepresentable (a point to which I will return), the subjects
that Salcedos artworks call upon viewers to see are,
strictly speaking, visually inaccessible.
In an early Untitled installation (198990; recreated for the current exhibition; pp. 4647), stacks
of folded mens shirts, impaled on steel poles,
focused attention on a series of massacres of banana
plantation workers that occurred in the Urab region
of Colombia in 1988.7 Similarly, for Atrabiliarios
(19922004; pp. 10209), made in response to her
research on the experiences of female victims of disappearance, Salcedo concealed individual and paired
shoes within small niches built into the walls of
various exhibition venues.8 In both of these projects,
the artist used mundane personal objects to invoke
the bodies that would have worn them, bodies that,

having been forcibly vanished from both their private and their public lives, are just as tangibly absent
from herworks.
Such features are prevalent in Salcedos La
Casa Viuda (199295; pp. 11021) series as well.
In La Casa Viuda I (199294; pp.11011), the artist attached a chair fragment to the lower half of a
wooden door and fastened the fabric of a white lace
dress to the chair. La Casa Viuda II (199394; pp.
11215) grafts a light brown door to a dark brown
bureau, which has a frayed scrap of plaid with an
exposed zipper affixed to its exterior. In both artworks, the wooden elements bear tangible signs
of physical wear while the fabric evokes a sense of
bodily contact; however, the bodies that they evoke
are missingfrom the scene and unavailable to be
seen. Salcedo thus calls on viewers to register the
fact of their absence in part byseeing something that
is not,in fact, there.9
Such matters have repeatedly been discussed
in relation to Salcedos work over the past twenty-plus years. As Charles Merewether has noted,
especially apparent in Salcedos artworks is an
exploration of the limits of visual representation,
and of that space which is subject to erasure by
dominant forms of representation and institutional
frameworks of circulation.10 Similarly, Santiago
Villaveces-Izquierdo has asserted that one of the
key issues throughout the artists sculptures is the
recognition of the limits of re-presenting and, with
it, the exploration of the shadowy terrain of the
intractable, the unspeakable, and the immemorial.11
These observations are shared by Jill Bennett, who
has declared that in its investigation of pain, grief,
mourning, and associated emotions resulting from
violence and trauma, Salcedos work aims at a form
of visual ellipsis that leaves [viewers] graspingfor
content never fully described.12 Edlie Wong has
likewise contended that the artist addresses subjects who fall outside of established systems of
representation.13
With these points in mind, seeing is perhaps
not simply confused but foreclosed altogether in
Salcedos sculptures and installations, and in this
12/12/14 1:24 PM
31
rejection of visual representation, the artists work

might be described as iconoclastic.14 Elements
of iconoclasm are perhaps most prevalent in her
recurring use of what Madeleine Grynsztejn has
described as techniques of eradication, disfiguration, blockage, and especially removal, all of which
resist, and to a certain degree even counter, conventional modes of representation.15
Such techniques are apparent in Salcedos
Untitled sculptures (19892008; pp. 58101), made
from furniture that the artist filled with concrete
and in which she encased articles of clothing and
smaller pieces of furniture. In these works the furniture manifests its own solid sense of presence, at
the same time that it also shows visible signs of use
and makes a link to the personal, intimate settings
ofdaily life. Ultimately, though, these physically
present, even obdurate objects capture only remnants of personal use, suggesting human presence
that has been made irretrievably absent.
These techniques are additionally evident in
Salcedos three Unland artworks (199598; 1997;
1998; pp. 12235), each composed of two mismatched
table halves attached together. The artist wrapped
lengths of sheer, almost luminous white fabric across
sections of all three sculptures and fixed the cloth in
place with an intricate network of strand after strand
of hair, stitched not simply through the fabric but
into and through the wooden mass of the objects.
The resulting sculptures have corporeal and, in particular, what Euridice Arratia has described as epidermal properties, through which they activate the
power of memory to recover the effaced bod[ies]
of victims of political violence.16 However, as Laura
Garcia Moreno has noted, these sculptures also
emphasize the difficulty of memory under specific
historical circumstances, which may be traced to
the ways in which Salcedos work brings into view
disappearedbodies that are profoundly invisible.17
These engagements, with their iconoclastic
overtones, are not exclusive to Salcedos artworks.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of artists began to turn away from the image-dominated
practices of photography and painting that had
arguably become prominent in the later 1970s and
1980s. Instead, these artists increasingly looked

to the 1960s and early 1970s, and specifically to
Minimalism and Postminimalism, in conjunction
with early second wave feminism and subsequent
developments in feminist and queer theory, to
experimentwith sculpture, installation, and related
three-dimensional practices and to address the politics of representation in relation to questions of visibility and invisibility.18
Many of these artists, such as Felix GonzalezTorres (19571996), Mona Hatoum (b. 1952), and
Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963), along with Salcedo,
have combined the spatial engagements of Minimalism with the expanded material possibilities of
Postminimalism to explore the experiences of bodies
historically excluded from and denied visibility in
traditional political, social, and cultural categories in
modern and contemporary life: lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer bodies; exiled and incarcerated bodies; and working class bodies, to name a few
examples. In acknowledging and foregrounding the
exclusions endured by these bodies, such artistic
developments are linked to an even broader cultural
concern, the postwar crisis in and of representation.
Indeed, much of the work from the late 1980s
and early 1990s contends with these experiences of
exclusion, which, in their violence and trauma, have
at times been perceived as unrepresentable. Incontemporary art, notions of unrepresentability can be
traced to the years following World War II, when
representation came to be understood as deeply
compromised, if not at a complete loss; in the wake
of the Shoah, or Holocaust, conventional modes
of representation were, for many, fundamentally
inadequate to the task of accounting for mass-scale
torture and murder.19 These challenges frequently
drew upon iconoclastic claims that certain subjects
exceed all capacities of representation and that any
such attempts risk blasphemy and transgression
(Mondzain 2005, 6566, 7073, and 18283).20
Given the arguable surfeit of violence in the
early twenty-first century, these matters are incon
trovertibly (if also all too disturbingly) still very
much contemporary in and to our current moment.
However, the relationships among representation,
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32
unrepresentability, and violence have become

increasingly complex in recent years. Depictions
of violence have become more widely available,
perhaps above all in broadcast media.21 Yet these
images have also been subject to extensive legal
proscriptions, including the ban on photographs of
the coffins of deceased US soldiers from the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq22 and the near-total invisibility
of prisoners of the so-called war on terror.23 Jettisoned from vision and representation via legal prohibitions and related forms of censorship, violence
isthus shaped by a notion of unrepresentability that
is deployed by, at the same time that it serves, the
very forces that inflict it.
As a result, postwar ideas of unrepresentability
have conceivably become just as compromised as
those of representation that they previously targeted,and a number of scholars and theorists have
put unrepresentability under greater scrutiny, with
an eye to reexamining its status and meanings. In
particular, as philosopher Jacques Rancire has
asserted, the attestation of the exceptional event
considered unrepresentable runs a twofold risk:
[t]o subtract it, in the name of its exceptionality,
from ordinary conditions of representation is as dangerous as making it commonplace by representing it
according to the same rules as all others.24
Rancire has argued that existing notions of
unrepresentability have merged two distinct formulations of the concept: the incapacity of art to
represent extreme violence, torture, and genocide
and an ethical injunction prohibiting representations of such subjects.25 Rancire rejects both these
approaches. Instead, he posits that, in what he terms
the aesthetic regime of the arts, art is characterized
by an absolute freedom that draws in part from
unlimited . . . powers of representation (Rancire
2007, 126 and 130). Rather than being stymied by
seemingly inexpressible experiences and events, art
can engage with such subjects in all their complexity
and is arguably one of the most effective arenas in
which to do so (Rancire 2007, 126).
These considerations prompt an exploration
of Salcedos work in relation to the second, more
prosaic sense of seeing things, for there is much
for viewers to see in her artworks. For example,

the mens shirts in her early Untitled installation are
unmistakably available to be seen at the same time
that their references to absent and invisible bodies
are difficult to miss. Similarly, even if the shoes that
make up Atrabiliarios are relatively difficult to see,
they are held in place within their niches by pieces
of animal fiber that look remarkably like skin and
that are insistently apparent. Viewers of La Casa
Viuda I can clearly see the white dress, as well as
thedetails of its stitching, gathers, and lace, affixed
to the chair fragment at the bottom of the sculpture.
And while viewers might have to examine La Casa
Viuda II more closely to discern the scrap of plaid
fabric, they can still quite clearly make out its pattern and zipper detail.26
At the same time, these things that Salcedos
sculpture and installation projects put on display
exhibit signs of violence and appear to have seen
abuse. For instance, the neatly pressed and folded
shirts that make up the 198990 Untitled installation
are skewered on the pointed tips of the poles. In
Atrabiliarios, the cracked and scarred surfaces of animal tissue are held in place by crude, black stitches
around the edges of each wall opening. Jagged,
haphazard, and impossible to ignore, the sutures
explicitly suggest some kind of sharp instrument
repeatedly, painfully piercing flesh.
Similarly, in La Casa Viuda I the visibility of
thewhite dress goes hand in hand with its visual
effects, which include the appearance of having
beenin places melted to or otherwise torturously
fused with the chair fragment. Careful scrutiny
of La Casa Viuda II reveals not only the fabric but
also a human bone, which has been embedded
in a large crack along the top of the bureau and
especially evokes a body tortured or murdered and
rendered invisible. In bothartworks such details
are found within the context oflarger objects that
have sufferedhave seentheir own physical use
andabuse.
With this explicit evidence of trauma, which
is not only visible but also visualizes violence,
Salcedos artworks can in turn be understood to
manifest something akin to their own acts of seeing;
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33
that is to say, they are things that see such violence. By exposing to the field of vision the forces
and effects of brutality, Salcedos sculptures not only
exhibit the second sense of seeing things, but the
third sense develops in the artists work as well.
These combined visible properties and visual
capacities are also evident in the artists many
untitled furniture-and-concrete sculptures, in which
smaller pieces of furniture can be readily distinguished from the larger structures within which
theyare contained through variations in color, overall shape, surface decoration, and related details. A
number of these artworks, such as an armoire filled
with concrete (1998; pp. 7677), include articles
of clothing encased in the material and similarly
apparent. V
isibly trapped within the mass of concrete, the smaller pieces of furniture and clothing
vividlyevoke suffocation and entombment, and all
of these sculptures can be understood to visualize,
orsee, the torture of being buried alive.
In a related vein, Salcedos three Unland artworks also provide much to see, including the
thousands of hairs that cover areas of each artwork.
Indeed, the stitches that attach the fibers to the
sculptures may individually involve no more than
the relatively inconsequential prick of a needle,
but each one constitutes a physical rupture, and
the cumulative force of these thousands of piercingsexplicitly suggests intense pain, if not outright agony.27
By making these thingsincluding evidence of
violence and abusevisible, Salcedos sculpture and
installation projects effectively engage in their own
acts of seeing. In particular, the artist exposes political violence to vision in ways that cannot be ignored,
and as a result her artworks suggest that postwar
notions of unrepresentability, with their iconoclastic rejection of vision, do not entirely hold up. But
even as Salcedos sculptures and installations display
a wide range of things for viewers to perceive and
seem themselves to actively see violence, neither
ofthese senses of seeing things uses familiar, pictorial means of visual representation, and Salcedos
work consistently maintains its commitment to the
first sense as well.
Rancire has raised similar points: while arguing

that extreme experiences of violence and genocide
are perfectly representable, he has not proposed
that such engagements are formulated via any conventional modes of representation (Rancire 2007,
127; see also 123). In his aesthetic regime, which
extends into the current moment, what becomes
possible are artistic practices that are not bound to
conventions of resemblance or related notions of
intelligibility, causality, and comprehensibility and
that do not serve to simply bring experiences or
events back to life (Rancire 2007, 127). Rather
than depicting or animating particular subjects, art in
the aesthetic regime imposes presence (Rancire
2007, 121).
It is through this imposition of presence that art
can explore phenomena such as mass violence and
genocide; however, as Rancire has contended what
is to be represented is not executioners and victims,
but the process of a double elimination: the elimination of the Jews [or other populations subject to
extreme violence] and the elimination of the traces
of their elimination (Rancire 2007, 127). Such
artistic engagements thus investigate not only terror,
torture, and their victims but also the systems and
mechanisms that enable and enforce terror and that
also work to make violence itself invisible. Transforming the double disappearanceof political
violence into something that can be apprehended,
these artistic engagements frequently involve, as
Rancire has put it, an artistic choice ... to activate
absence (Rancire 2008), which again recalls iconoclastic practices and is, of course, everywhere apparent in Salcedos artwork.
Rather than serving as an example of iconoclastic practices in contemporary art, however, this
choice can be understood to invoke the visual and
political operations of icons, as they have been arti
culated by Marie-Jos Mondzain.28 At first glance,
associating Salcedos work with icons could appear
problematic, given the ways in which icons are often
conceived as artifact[s] of presence and of hopes for
salvation (Mondzain 2005, xii). But Mondzain has
countered any such salutary notions of iconicity
(Mondzain 2005, xi). Instead, she has framed icons
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34
as objects that exist not as duplicate representations

of their models, but in relation to them (Mondzain
2005, 7779, 8182, and 94); icons only approach or
approximate their models via the absolute distance
and radical absence of their models from the visible,
mortal world (Mondzain 2005, 88).29 Icons incarnatewithdrawal itself (Mondzain 2005, 81): they
are empty of the carnal and real presence of
their models and are at the same time full of . . .
absence (Mondzain 2005, 94), thus present[ing]
the grace of an absence within a system of graphic
inscription (Mondzain 2005, 88).30
While they solicit the sensitive contemplation of a glittering absence, icons simultaneously
attract . . . the gaze of truth, the absent and other
wise invisible, but no less potent, gaze of divinity
(Mondzain 2005, 90). To put it another way, icons
give rise to a visible experience of divine power, or
of authority more generally (Mondzain 2005, 91), an
experience in which seeing, for viewers, implies
being seen (Mondzain 2005, 90). Ultimately, [t]he
icon contemplates us (Mondzain 2005, 90) and is a
thing that sees in my third sense of the phrase, just
as Salcedos artworks can be understood to be.
In the artists work, the inaccessible power that
becomes visible is not simply that of victims, who
have, as the artist herself has noted and as her artworks make abundantly clear, an incontrovertible
presence in the world.31 Salcedos sculptures and
installations also bring to the fore the presence and
operations of forces typically hidden and removed
from daily life, but which also circulate throughout
that life, such as various, often violent, forms of state
and political power. This visible experience of
absent and invisible powerdivine authority in the
case of icons; political violence in Salcedos work
is, according to Mondzain, the very essence of the
visible (Mondzain 2005, 94) and is still with us
now in current conceptions of art, images, and representation (Mondzain 2005, xii).32 It is to create this
visible, and visual, experience of power that, to use
Rancires terminology, Salcedo activates absence
and imposes presence in her investigation of the
forces and effects of political violence throughout
her work.
Or, to use my language, Salcedo can be understood not simply to deploy individually the first,
second, and third senses of seeing things but to
intersect them, creating a concurrence of seeing
through which her work engages the full complexityof its subjects. Salcedos artworks address politicalviolence and its victims perhaps above all by
actively seeing them. They achieve this in part by
putting on display evidence that, in its availability
tobe seen, foregrounds missing victims and the
myriad forms of abuse they have experienced in all
their invisibility.33
In addition to making victims visually percep
tible, and themselves seeing and making available to
be seen the brutality of political violence, Salcedos
artworks make accessible, in all three senses of seeing things, its hidden workings, which Rancire has
described as its double elimination (Rancire 2007,
127) or double disappearance (Rancire 2008) and
which Diana Taylor has termed percepticide.34
The triumph of atrocity, Taylor has noted, is that
it force[s] people to look away . . . [s]pectacles of violence rende[r] the population silent, deaf, and blind
(Taylor, 12223). Indeed, at the same time that
such violence operates through acts of kidnapping,
torture, and murder, it also polices the perceptions
of bystanders and survivors, typically prohibiting
the acknowledgment of its very existence. Or, as
Rancire has put it, in many instances, genocide
... plan[s] to eradicate its own traces (Rancire
2009, 125).35
This making accessible the otherwise inaccessible mechanisms of violence is evident in artworks
such as Atrabiliarios, in which the near-invisibility
of the shoes, all but hidden from view, foregrounds
both now-absent bodies and the fact that they have
been disappeared. In particular, by partially concealing the shoes, the animal fiber enactsand thus puts
on displaymechanisms of hiding and disappearance, disclosing another hidden element ofpolitical
violence, its elimination of evidence of itsown
existence.
Such efforts to hide the criminality of political
violence are also made visible through the complex
spatial configurations of many of the artists projects.
12/12/14 1:24 PM
35
Space is especially at issue in political violence and

disappearance; as Taylor has noted, one of the most
devastating consequences of political terror is that
it threatens to reduce the world of the public, in
terms both of the actual numbers of people present
and of public spaces made into violent, oppressive,
policed spaces (Taylor, 130). Similarly, as Bennett
has observed, a central element of political violence is the transformation of space itself into an
arena in which there is no stable backdrop and
the capacity of vision to make sense of the world
breaksdown.36
In 1994, in one of her early exhibitions in the
United States, Salcedo foregrounded this deformation of space by configuring the installation of two
works from her La Casa Viuda series to create what
Monica Amor has described as a wide empty space
and a void at the center of the site (Amor, 166).
This conspicuous evacuation of space, with its sense
of [d]isplacement, loss, disappearance, and death
(Amor, 166), points to the forcible emptying out of
space that violence enacts but typically disavows,
further exposing the mechanisms by which violence
disappears itself.
Salcedo has similarly used striking installations
of her Untitled furniture-and-concrete sculptures to
make mechanisms of political violence visible. In
projects for the 1995 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (pp. 6669) and the 1999 Liverpool Biennial
(pp. 7881), a number of these Untitled artworks
seemed to be positioned too close to one another,
even shoved uncomfortably to one side or into a
corner of the exhibition space. In the Pittsburgh
installation, a large group of artworks appeared to
have been rounded up at one end of the space, with
a separate pair of sculptures placed at the opposite
end of the gallery, distant and displaced from the
larger group. For the Liverpool exhibition, sited in
the Anglican Cathedral, Salcedo positioned several
artworks as if to bracket off or enclose a small fraction of the interior, creating a confined space within
the otherwise vast expanse of the nave. Some of the
sculptures stood apart from others, isolated, cut off,
and completely dwarfed by the towering scale of
thecathedral.
In both installations, the arrangements of the

sculptures prescribed some perceptions and movements while proscribing others, just as violence
permits certain perceptions and movements while
disallowing others. As in her 1994 exhibition in New
York City, the disproportionate distributions of the
Untitled artworks within and across the subsequent
Pittsburgh and Liverpool venues formed odd gaps
and enclosures; the vast, open public spaces became
compressed and constrained, pointing to the ways in
which political violence forcibly transforms spaces of
public circulation and engagement into sites of containment and oppression.
Salcedos Unland sculptures also bring into
view the hidden forces and disavowals of political
violence. The sheer, white fabric and extensive
networks of hairs that so insistently evoke the body
are quite apparent, yet from certain vantage points
and under certain lighting conditions these same
elements create an optical illusion that makes the
sculptures seem to disappear into their surroundings. As light illuminates the web of stitches in
the diaphanous white cloth of an artwork such as
Unland: audible in the mouth (1998; pp. 13235), the
lighter-toned, nearly white table fragment appears
to dematerialize into the gallery wall toward which
it is oriented. In other words, at the same time that
Salcedos Unland artworks might, like many of her
other furniture-based sculptures, be grounded in
the literal pull of gravity as well as the figurative
pull of gravitas, they also seem to activate their own
vanishing, making disappearance itself apparent.37
By becoming almost invisible before their viewers eyes, the Unland sculptures themselves seem
to exceed vision and representation, exposing the
ways in which political violence counters vision and
representation to formulate itselfas being, precisely,
unrepresentable.
Indeed, while many cultural and artistic
engagements have aligned traditional modes of
representation with oppression, embracing instead
unrepresentability and its perceived potential for
resistance, Salcedos work addresses and engages
with unrepresentability as one among many possible
contemporary distribution[s] of the sensible that
12/12/14 1:24 PM
36
does not foreclose or prohibit any artistic subjects or

practices and that can be implicated in political violence just as much as it can oppose it.38 In revealing
the at least double-edged, and at times profoundly
contradictory, operations of unrepresentability,
Salcedos work calls to mind both Rancires and
Mondzains more recent reconsiderations of these
and related concerns. Specifically, as these scholars
have articulated, representation itself traffics in
absence, emptiness, and invisibility, qualities previously understood as belonging to unrepresentability,
and as a result, both representation and unrepresentability take shape in far more nuanced terms.
Furthermore, and as Rancire and Mondzain
argue, these overlapping relationships suggest that
unrepresentability can come under the purview of
representation, as it does in Salcedos work. Salcedo
has addressed subjects conceived as unrepresentable via artistic practices that, even as they reject
conventional modes of pictorial representation and
are in certain senses aligned with iconoclasm, return
her subjects to vision and to what can be conceived
as representation. Highlighting the ways systems of
oppression can, and often do, conceal themselves in
order to make themselves effectively unrepresentable, Salcedos artworks put unrepresentability, in
allits contradictions and complexities, on view.
Such aspects of Salcedos work are also evident in a number of site-specific installations that
she produced in Europe in the first decade of the
twenty-first century: Neither, a 2004 exhibition at
White Cube in London (pp. 16065); Abyss, a project
at the Castello di Rivoli for the 2005 Turin Triennial (pp. 16671); and Shibboleth, an intervention
in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London
in 2007 (pp.17279). In these threeinstallations,
Salcedo again used space to foregroundpopulations subjected to various state forces, along with
the mechanisms of power that sustain such forces,
by transforming prominent Western galleries
and museums into sites of separation, detention,
andincarceration.39
In these projects, the artist revisited spatial
properties of confinement, compression, and constraint; however, rather than filling her locations
with freestanding sculptures in unconventional

arrangements, she incorporated a series of structural
alterations into each site. In Abyss and Shibboleth,
Salcedo built her modifications into, respectively,
the ceiling and floor of the two venues, leaving their
interior spaces more or less vacant; in Neither, she
constructed a gallery of sorts within the gallery. As a
result, Neither, Abyss, and Shibboleth merged with their
sites and took on an element of inconspicuousness
or subtlety. This quality itself served as a mechanism
of oppression; literallyintegrated into the architecture, these site-specificinterventions naturalized the
oppressive properties of their surroundings, simultaneously masking and intensifying the impact of the
spaces, which in turn expanded their effects. Atthe
same time, though, by leaving the venues empty
and providing nothing else to see, these artworks
exposed their otherwise inconspicuous interventions, with their links to unrepresentability, to view.
Neither, Abyss, and Shibboleth thus demonstrate
the artists continuing use and investigation of the
overlapping relationships between representation
and unrepresentability. Throughout Salcedos career,
her works have not only directed attention to populations removed from space and from view, they have
also seen and made available to be seen the intricate
workings of political oppression, which, in displacing certain populations and also vanishing violence,
often claim unrepresentability for their own ends.
In these respects, Salcedos work continues to
draw upon earlier notions of unrepresentability to
counter political violence, at the same time that
the artist repeatedly interrogates these understandings of unrepresentability. In particular, Salcedo
has, following Rancire and Mondzain, repeatedly
exposed unrepresentability to vision, making visible
its complex visual conditionswhich often involve
seeing something that is not in fact on viewas
well as its political implications, in which unrepresentability can not only resist but may also at times
serve systems of political oppression and violence.
Throughout the twenty-plus years of its contemporaneity, Salcedos artwork has thus insistently seen
the multiple, and at times contradictory, operations
of (purportedly) unrepresentable phenomena as well
12/12/14 1:24 PM
37
as of unrepresentability itself. In so doing, Salcedos

sculpture and installation projects have been,
and continue to be, triply engaged in, precisely,
seeingthings.
NOTES
1. See Terry Smith, Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,
Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 681707; Terry Smith, Okwui
Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture:
Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008); Questionnaire on The Contemporary, October 130 (Fall 2009): 3124; Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan
Wood, Anton Vidokle, eds., E-flux journal: What Is Contemporary
Art? (New York: Sternberg Press, 2010); Richard Meyer, What
Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
2. See especially Meyer, 25961.
3. On these points, see Questionnaire on The Contemporary; Smith, Enwezor, and Condee; Meyer. On the spectacle, see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995 [1967]); Guy
Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm
Imrie (London: Verso Books, 1990 [1988]).
4. On this point, see especially Smith, Enwezor, and Condee.
5. A number of authors have located the shift from modernism
and/or postmodernism to contemporaneity in the late 1980s
and early 1990s; in particular, see responses to Questionnaire
on The Contemporary by Terry Smith (4654), Alexander
Alberro (5560), Yates McKee (6473), and Isabelle Graw (119
21), as well as Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 68, 24243, and 25759;
Meyer, 1416.
6. Such points have been made by the majority of the authors
whose texts I cite throughout this article. In addition, I have
discussed such points in my earlier research on Salcedo, above
all in Elizabeth Adan, Acknowledging Disappearance, Representation, and Ritual in the Work of Doris Salcedo, in Matter,
Presence, Image: The Work of Ritual in Contemporary Feminist
Art (PhD diss., U.C. Santa Barbara, 2006), 15494.
7. Charles Merewether, Naming Violence in the Work of
Doris Salcedo, Third Text 24 (Autumn 1993): 3544; Nancy
Princenthal, Silence Seen, in Nancy Princenthal et al., Doris
Salcedo (London: Phaidon, 2000), 4089.
8. Olga M. Viso, Doris Salcedo: The Dynamics of Violence, in
Distemper: Dissonant Themes in Art of the 1990s, ed. Neal Benezra
and Olga M. Viso (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 8695.
9. Monica Amor, Doris Salcedo, ArtNexus 13 (JulySeptember
1994): 16667; Susan Harris, Doris Salcedo, Art Press 193
(July/August 1994): bilingual pages I; Faye Hirsch, Doris
Salcedo at Brooke Alexander, Art in America, October 1994, 136.
10. See also Charles Merewether, Zones of Marked Instability:
Woman and the Space of Emergence, in Rethinking Borders, ed.
John C. Welchman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 42, 10124.
11. Santiago Villaveces-Izquierdo, Art and Media-tion: Reflections on Violence and Representation, in Cultural Producers in
Perilous States: Editing Events, Documenting Change, ed. George E.
Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 237.
12. Jill Bennett, Tenebrae after September 11: Art, Empathy, and
the Global Politics of Belonging, in World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, eds. Jill Bennett and Rosanne K
ennedy
(Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 18990.
13. Edlie L. Wong, Haunting Absences: Witnessing Loss in
Doris Salcedos Atrabiliarios and Beyond, in The Image and the
Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, eds. Frances Guerin
and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 174. See
also Edlie Wong, The Afterlife of Loss: Situating Memory
in the Sculptural Art of Doris Salcedo, Critical Sense 9, no. 1
(Winter 2001): 5585. For more recent discussions of Salcedos
work in these terms, see also Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art
and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London:
I.B. Tauris, 2007), 5864; Judith Rugg, Exploring Site-Specific Art:
Issues of Space and Internationalism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010),
16165; Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedos
Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
14. A number of recent texts have drawn upon elements of
iconoclasm to investigate contemporary art and images, such as
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image
Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/
Center for Art and Media and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002); W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11
to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On
related points, see also Maria Hlavajova, Sven Ltticken, and
Jill Winder, eds., The Return of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical
Reader in Contemporary Art (Utrecht, Netherlands: BAK, 2009);
Sven Ltticken, Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the
Fundamentalist Spectacle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009). For an
approach to these matters that instead emphasizes the workings of icons, see Marie-Jos Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy:
The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico
Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005 [1996]);
I will turn to Mondzains work below.
15. Madeleine Grynsztejn, Voice of the Invisible, Tate, Etc. 11
(Autumn 2007): 46.
16. Euridice Arratia, Spotlight: Doris Salcedo, Flash Art 31,
no.202 (October 1998): 122. Dan Cameron has also noted the
follicle structure of these artworks; see Dan Cameron, Inconsolable, in Doris Salcedo (New York: New Museum of Art,
1998), 13. For a particularly in-depth discussion of the Unland
series, see Tanya Barson, Unland: The Place of Testimony,
Tate Papers 1 (Spring 2004), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/
publications/tate-papers/unland-place-testimony.
17. Laura Garcia Moreno, Troubled Materiality: The Installations of Doris Salcedo, Mosaic 43, no. 2 (June 2010): 97.
18. On these points, see, for example, Lynn Zelevansky, Sense
and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994); Nancy Spector,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995);
Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artists Body (London:
Phaidon, 2000).
12/12/14 1:24 PM
38
19. The most notable instance of this is Adornos widely cited

and discussed 1949 statement, [t]o write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric; see Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and
Society, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber N
icholsen,
in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003
[1949/1951]), 162. However, as Mieke Bal has shown in her
study of Salcedos work, Adornos injunction against conventional forms of representation has often been taken in far too
simplistic terms. In particular, as Bal has noted, Adornos assertion is only part of his larger examination, across a number of
texts, of the status of representation and art in the aftermath
of the Shoah, or Holocaust. In these texts, Bal has suggested,
at issue perhaps above all are questions of sense, affect, and
pleasure in and derived from representation and art (Bal, 6465).
What is more, Adorno explicitly amended his 1949 statement
in a subsequent text, in which he claimed, as Bal has written,
that the acutely adequate rendering of trauma in the painful
state of the survivor . . . is both legitimate and . . . necessary
(Bal, 66); see Theodor Adorno, After Auschwitz, in Negative
Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973
[1966]), 36165; cited in Bal, 6566; see also Bal, 2, 17, 8182,
and 12829.
20. The statusor, again, crisisof representation and its
attendant links to iconoclasm underwent various reconsiderations in the second half of the twentieth century, coming
back to the fore with particular force in the mid-1980s with the
release of Claude Lanzmanns landmark film Shoah (New York:
New Yorker Films, 1985); see also Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The
Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1995); Stuart Liebman, ed., Claude Lanzmanns Shoah: Key
Essays (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007). Since the
1980s, many artists, scholars, and medical professionals have
continued to investigate a wide range of violent experiences
and traumatic events, extending engagements with the postwar
crisis in representation and notions of unrepresentability into
more recent years; on these points, see, for instance, Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992);
Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996). For a different approach to
these topics, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000).
21. Thomas Keenan, Night Lights, or . . . Open Secrets, in
No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night, ed.
Anselm Franke et al. (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary
Art, 2006), 12429; Georges Didi-Huberman, Emotion Does
Not Say I: Ten Fragments on Aesthetic Freedom, trans.
Judith Hayward, in Griselda Pollock et al., Alfredo Jaar: La Politique des Images (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2007), 5770; PamelaM.
Lee, Open Secret, Artforum, May 2011, 22029. With Lees
discussion of what she terms the open secret in mind, it is
also worth noting Michael Taussigs work on similar concerns;
see especially Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the
Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1999).
22. Ann Pelligrini, Habeas Corpus: Behold the Body, TDR:
The Drama Review 52, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 180. See also Jacques
Rancire, Theater of Images, trans. Judith Hayward, in
Pollock et al., 7180 (hereafter Rancire 2007a); Marie-Jos
Mondzain, Can Images Kill?, trans. Sally Shafto, Critical
Inquiry 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 2051.
23. Perhaps the most notorious exceptions to such near-total
invisibility are the images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison that
first surfaced and circulated in 2004. However, the relationships
between visibility and invisibility, and between representation
and unrepresentability, in these images are also quite complex;
see, for example, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Remote Control,
Artforum, Summer 2004, 61, 64; Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu
Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion, 2007); Mitchell, 2011. On
related matters, see Avery F. Gordon, In the Hem, in Franke
et al., 10209.
24. Jacques Rancire, Is Cinema to Blame?, in Chronicles of
Consensual Times, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum: 2010 [1999]), 4043, 43. On this point, see also Jean-Luc
Nancy, Forbidden Representation, in The Ground of the Image,
trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005
[2001]),35.
25. On these points, see especially Jacques Rancire, The Future
of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007 [2003]),
11011; Jacques Rancire and Indisciplinarity, trans. Gregory
Elliot, Art and Research 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008), http://www
.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html (hereafter Rancire
2008); Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans.
Steven Corcoran (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009 [2004]), 12327.
See also Nancy, 2829.
26. For an extended discussion of the scrap of fabric in La Casa
Viuda II and related matters in La Casa Viuda I, see Bal, 10013.
27. Andreas Huyssen has mentioned Salcedos use of a very
small, 164 drill bit to create the network of holes in at least
one ofthe Unland works; see Andreas Huyssen, Focus, in
Princenthal et al., 100.
28. Similarly, Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that notions of iconoclasm do not adequately or accurately account for certain
counter- or antirepresentational engagements; see Nancy, 2930.
29. Nancy has also contended that representation involves an
element of absence, in part through what he terms (borrowing
from Blanchot) absense, which he aligns with the motif of a God
who in no way challenges the image [that is to say, a God that
does not demand iconoclasm] but who gives his [or her] truth
only through the retreat of his [or her] presence (Nancy, 32).
Specifically, absense is the sense of this particular retreating,
withdrawn, and invisible divine presence (Nancy, 32).
30. Mondzains discussion prioritizes two-dimensional images
and graphic inscription (Mondzain 2005, 88) in part because
three-dimensional objects have traditionally been understood
to run a much higher risk of idolatry. In contrast to icons, idols
are characterized by a fullness of presence in which there is
no absence, emptiness, invisibility, or any other distant and
missing element to be perceived (Mondzain 2005, 9296 and
12/12/14 1:24 PM
39
17691). Similarly, Nancy has discussed the ways in which

Judeo-Christian injunctions against idols especially forbi[d]
the making of sculpted images (Nancy, 30), primarily because
sculpture and related three-dimensional practices produc[e]
... forms that are solid, whole, and autonomous, which in turn
give rise to [a] full and heavy presence, a presence of or within
an immanence where nothing opens . . . and from which nothing
departs or withdraws (Nancy, 3031). However, properties such
as absence, emptiness, and invisibility, as well as complex relationships between representation and unrepresentabilityall
of which recall iconsare perceived as being integral to a range
of three-dimensional objects in recent scholarship on material
culture and so-called thing theory. See Bill Brown, ed., Things
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [2001]); Hito Steyerl, The Language of Things, Transversal (June 2006), http://
eipcp.net/transversal/0606/steyerl/en; Bill Brown, Objects,
Others, and Us (The Refabrication of Things), Critical Inquiry
36, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 183217; Sven Ltticken, Art and
Thingness, Part I: Bretons Ball and Duchamps Carrot, Art
and Thingness, Part II: Thingification, and Art and Thingness, Part III: The Heart of the Thing Is the Thing We Dont
Know, e-flux journal 13 (February 2010), 15 (April 2010), and 16
(May 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and-thingness
-part-one-breton%E2%80%99s-ball-and-duchamp%E2%80%99s
-carrot/, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and-thingness-part
-two-thingification/, and http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and
-thingness-part-three-the-heart-of-the-thing-is-the-thing-we
-don%E2%80%99t-know/. On related points, see also Lorraine
Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science
(New York: Zone Books, 2004); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005); Michael Taussig, The Stories Things
Tell and Why They Tell Them, e-flux journal 36 (July 2012),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-stories-things-tell-and-why
-they-tell-them/.
31. Doris Salcedo, interview by Carlos Basualdo, in Princenthal
et al., 16.
32. In a related vein, Nancy has suggested that the intersection between absence and presence, and between invisibility
and visibilityin other words, the exchange of forces that in
Mondzains account characterizes iconsis a defining property
of much art and of representation more generally; see Nancy, 38.
33. This intersection of what might otherwise be described
as opposing notions of seeing things aligns with Rancires
aesthetic regime of the arts; one of the major features of the aesthetic regime, as Rancire has described it, is its conjunction of
oppositional positions and ideas; on these points, see especially
Rancire 2007, 11819; see also Jacques Rancire, The Politics
of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004
[2000]), 2326.
34. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and
Nationalism in Argentinas Dirty War (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997), 123.
35. In a similar vein, Rancire has described the police as a
symbolic constitution of the social, which is also to say a
distribution of the sensible in which the organizing principle
or primary goal is to divert attention from, and in many cases

altogether disable perception of, any kind of absence, void, or
other supplement that is, according to Rancire, constitutive
of politics; see Jacques Rancire, Ten Theses on Politics,
trans. Rachel Bowlby with modifications by Davide Panagia,
Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001), https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/
theory_and_event/summary/v005/5.3ranciere.html. In particular,
Rancire has explored the example of police intervention in
public spaces, in which the police frequently claim [t]here
is nothing to see here (Rancire 2001). This nothing to see
closely parallels what Nancy has termed super-representation;
see Nancy, 3850. For a more extended discussion of Salcedos
work as political in related senses, see Bal.
36. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 68. See
also Jill Bennett, Art, Affect, and the Bad Death: Strategies
for Communicating the Sense Memory of Loss, Signs 28, no. 1
(Autumn 2002): 33351.
37. On the gravitas of these sculptures, see also Princenthal, 72.
38. On the distribution of the sensible in relation to aes
thetics, see especially Rancire 2004. In the context of contemporary art, Rancire is perhaps best known for this notion,
whichhas been cited and explored by a wide range of artists,
historians, and critics; in particular, see Artforum (March 2007),
which includes numerous articles and artist statements on
Rancires work.
39. On these artworks, see especially Rod Mengham, Failing
Better: Salcedos Trajectory, in Doris Salcedo: Neither (London:
White Cube, 2004), 933; Morgan Falconer, Contemporary
Sculpture, Burlington Magazine 146 (December 2004): 83738;
Joshua Mack, Violent Ends, Modern Painters (December
2004January 2005), 5456; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Abyss:
Notes on the Art of Doris Salcedo, in The Pantagruel Syndrome:
T1 Torino Triennale Tremusei 2005 (Milan: Skira, 2005), 14043;
Joshua Mack, Doris Salcedo: Freedom Fighting, Art Review
15 (2007): 5863; Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed., Doris Salcedo:
Shibboleth (London: Tate, 2007); Stella Baraklianou, Silently
Disturbing: The Political Aesthetics of Doris Salcedos Recent
Installations (2008), http://www.axisweb.org/dlFULL.aspx
?ESSAYID=107. For a further discussion of these artworks in
relation to both their site-specificity and their indictment of
Western nations and histories vis--vis state-sponsored oppression and violence, see Elizabeth Adan, An Imperative to Interrupt: Radical Aesthetics, Global Contexts, and Site-Specificity
in the Recent Work of Doris Salcedo, Third Text 24, no. 5 (September 2010): 58396.
12/12/14 1:24 PM
12/12/14 1:24 PM
Plates
3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 41
12/12/14 1:24 PM
42
Untitled, 1986
Steel shelving, steel cot, plastic dolls, rubber, wax,
and animal fiber
73 9478 1818 in. (187 241 46 cm)
12/12/14 1:24 PM
12/12/14 1:24 PM
44
Untitled (detail), 1986
12/12/14 1:24 PM
45
12/12/14 1:24 PM
46
Installation view, Galera Garcs Velsquez,

Bogot, 1990
12/12/14 1:24 PM
12/12/14 1:24 PM
48
12/12/14 1:24 PM
49
Untitled (and detail, left), 198990

Steel bed frames, plaster, cotton shirts, and animal fiber
Two parts, each: 7178 35 5 in. (182.6 89.5 14 cm)
12/12/14 1:24 PM
50
Untitled (detail), 198990/2013

Cotton shirts, steel, and plaster
Five parts, overall: 70316 901516 1038 in.
(178.3 231 26.3 cm)
pp. 5253:
Installation view, Doris Salcedo Studio, Bogot, 2013
12/12/14 1:24 PM
12/12/14 1:24 PM
52
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
Dimensions TK, Dimensions cm TK
Collection information TK
12/12/14 1:25 PM
53
12/12/14 1:25 PM
54

67 18 10 in. (170.9 45.9 25.5 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
55
12/12/14 1:25 PM
56
Untitled, 1989
Steel crib, steel mesh, fabric, and wax
38 31 18 in. (96 79 45 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
58
12/12/14 1:25 PM
59
Untitled, 1990
Wooden table, steel table, and concrete
28 21 18 in. (72.5 55 45.5 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
60
Untitled (and detail, right), 1989

Wooden chair with upholstery, concrete, and steel
38 16 17 in. (97.8 42.5 45 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
61
12/12/14 1:25 PM
62
Untitled, 1992
Wooden armoire with glass, wooden chairs with
upholstery, concrete, and steel
45 73 20 in. (114.3 186.7 50.8 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
63
12/12/14 1:25 PM
64
Untitled, 1995
Wooden dresser, wooden chairs with upholstery,
concrete, and steel
93 41 19 in. (236.2 104.1 48.2 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
67
pp. 6669:
Installation views, 52nd Carnegie International,
Pittsburgh, 1995
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
70
Untitled, 1995
Wooden armoire, wooden bed frame, concrete, steel,
and clothing
7718 7478 4958 in. (195.8 189.9 125.8 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
71
12/12/14 1:25 PM
72
12/12/14 1:25 PM
73
12/12/14 1:25 PM
74
Installation view, Le Creux de lenfer, Centre dart

contemporain, Thiers, France, 1996
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
76
Untitled (and detail, above), 1998

Wooden armoire with glass, concrete, steel, and
clothing
72 39 13 in. (183.5 99.5 33 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
78
pp. 7881:
Installation views, Anglican Cathedral, 1st Liverpool Biennial
of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, 1999
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
80
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:25 PM
81
12/12/14 1:25 PM
82
Above, left:
Wooden chair with upholstery, concrete, and steel
38 16 22 in. (98.2 42.7 57.4 cm)
Above, right:
Untitled, 2000
Wooden chair, concrete, and steel
32116 1618 1618 in. (81.5 41 41 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
83
12/12/14 1:25 PM
84
Untitled, 2007
Wooden armoire, wooden chair, concrete, and steel
39 78 19 in. (100.5 200 48.5 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
85
12/12/14 1:25 PM
86
Untitled, 1998
Wooden armoires, wooden table, concrete, and steel
71 49 25 in. (181 124.5 63.5 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
88

Wooden armoires, concrete, and steel
89 57 23 in. (228 145 59 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
89
12/12/14 1:25 PM
90
Untitled, 1998
Wooden armoire, wooden cabinet, concrete, and steel
49 82 34 in. (124.5 208.3 88.3 cm)
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
92
Untitled, 2008
Wooden armoire, wooden cabinet, concrete, and steel
8658 95 40 in. (220 242 102 cm)
pp. 9495:
Installation view, White Cube, Hoxton Square,
London, 2007
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM
94
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:25 PM
95
12/12/14 1:25 PM
96
Untitled, 2001
Wooden armoire, wooden cabinet with glass,
concrete, steel, and clothing
80 67 50 in. (203.5 170 127 cm)
pp. 9899:
Left:
Untitled, 2008
Wooden table, wooden armoires, concrete, and steel
30 97 4758 in. (78 247 121 cm)
Right:
Untitled, 2008
Wooden table, wooden armoires, concrete, and steel
30 105 68 in. (76 268.5 172.5 cm)
Installation view, Doris Salcedo Studio, Bogot, 2008
12/12/14 1:25 PM
97
12/12/14 1:25 PM
98
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:25 PM
99
12/12/14 1:25 PM
100
Untitled (details, above and right), 2008
12/12/14 1:25 PM
101
12/12/14 1:25 PM
102
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
103
12/12/14 1:26 PM
104
pp. 10207:
Atrabiliarios, 19922004
Shoes, drywall, paint, wood,
animal fiber, and surgical thread
43 niches and 40 boxes; overall
dimensions variable
Installation views, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, 2005
12/12/14 1:26 PM
105
12/12/14 1:26 PM
106
12/12/14 1:26 PM
12/12/14 1:26 PM
108
Atrabiliarios (detail), 19922004
12/12/14 1:26 PM
109
12/12/14 1:26 PM
110
La Casa Viuda I (and detail, right), 199294

Wooden door, wooden chair, clothing, and thread
221316 23 15316 in. (57.8 59.7 38.7 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
111
12/12/14 1:26 PM
112
12/12/14 1:26 PM
113
La Casa Viuda II, 199394

Wooden door, wooden cabinet, wood, steel,
clothing, and bone
Four parts, overall: 102 3138 23 in.
(259.7 79.7 60.3 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
114
12/12/14 1:26 PM
115
La Casa Viuda II (details, left and above), 199394
12/12/14 1:26 PM
116
La Casa Viuda III (and detail, right), 1994

Wooden doors, wooden bed frame, and clothing
Two parts: 101 34 238 in. (258.5 86.4 6 cm)
and 32 34 2 in. (83.2 86.4 5.1 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
117
12/12/14 1:26 PM
118
La Casa Viuda IV (and detail, right), 1994

Wooden door, wooden bed frame, clothing, and bone
102516 18 13 in. (259.9 47 33 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
119
12/12/14 1:26 PM
120
La Casa Viuda VI (and detail, above), 1995

Wooden doors, steel chair, and bone
Three parts: 7478 39 18 in. (190.2 99.1 47 cm);
6278 47 22 in. (159.7 119.3 55.8 cm); and
62 38 18 in. (158.7 96.5 46.9 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
12/12/14 1:26 PM
122
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
123
12/12/14 1:26 PM
124
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
125
12/12/14 1:26 PM
126
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
127
12/12/14 1:26 PM
128
pp. 12223:
Installation view, SITE Santa Fe, 199899
pp. 12427:
Unland: the orphans tunic (details), 1997
Wooden tables, silk, human hair, and thread
31 96 38 in. (80 245 98 cm)
Unland: irreversible witness, 199598
Wooden tables, steel crib, silk, human hair,
and thread
44 98 35 in. (111.8 248.9 88.9 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
129
12/12/14 1:26 PM
130
12/12/14 1:26 PM
131
Unland: irreversible witness (detail), 199598
12/12/14 1:26 PM
132
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
133
12/12/14 1:26 PM
134
pp. 13235:
Unland: audible in the mouth, 1998
Wooden tables, silk, human hair, and thread
31 29 124 in. (80 75 315 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
135
12/12/14 1:26 PM
136
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
137
12/12/14 1:26 PM
138
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
139
pp. 13639:
Tenebrae Noviembre 7, 1985 (and detail, left),
19992000
Lead and steel
Thirty-nine parts, overall: 76 221 218 in.
(193 561.3 555 cm)
12/12/14 1:26 PM
140
Noviembre 6, 2001
Stainless steel, lead, wood, and resin
Three parts: 44 30 16 in.
(112.5 78 41 cm); 47 29
19 in. (120.5 74.5 48.5 cm); and
24 16 14 in. (62 41.5
37.5 cm); overall dimensions variable
12/12/14 1:26 PM
12/12/14 1:26 PM
142
Thou-less (detail), 200102

Stainless steel
Nine parts; overall dimensions
variable
12/12/14 1:26 PM
143
12/12/14 1:26 PM
144
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:26 PM
145
12/12/14 1:26 PM
146
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
147
Left:
Thou-less (detail), 200102
pp. 14445:
Thou-less, 200102
Stainless steel
Nine parts; overall dimensions variable
Installation view, Neue Galerie, Museumslandschaft
Hessen Kassel, Germany, 2014
Above:
Untitled, 200405
Stainless steel
42 48 27 in. (107 122 70 cm)
12/12/14 1:27 PM
148
pp. 14849:
Untitled, August 20, 1999
Roses
Dimensions variable
Ephemeral public project, Bogot, 1999
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
150

Roses
Dimensions variable
12/12/14 1:27 PM
151

Roses
Dimensions variable
12/12/14 1:27 PM
152
Nov. 6, 11:45 am
Nov. 6, 12 pm
Nov. 6, 2:15 pm
Nov. 6, 4:30 pm
pp. 15255:
Noviembre 6 y 7, 2002
Two hundred and eighty wooden chairs and rope
Dimensions variable
Ephemeral public project, Palace of Justice,
Bogot, 2002
12/12/14 1:27 PM
153
Nov. 6, 8 pm
Nov. 7, 11:30 am
Nov. 7, 4 pm
Nov. 7, 7:40 pm
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
155
12/12/14 1:27 PM
156
pp. 15659:
Untitled, 2003
One thousand one hundred and fifty wooden chairs
Approx. 33 20 20 ft. (10.1 6.1 6.1 m)
Ephemeral public project, 8th International Istanbul
Biennial, 2003
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
160
12/12/14 1:27 PM
161
pp. 16065:
Neither, 2004
Steel fencing, drywall, and paint
194 291 590 in. (494 740 1500 cm)
Installation views, White Cube, Hoxton Square, London, 2004
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
164
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
165
12/12/14 1:27 PM
166
pp. 16671:
Abyss, 2005
Brick, concrete, steel, and epoxy resin
17358 54558 63938 in. (441 1386 1624 cm)
Installation views, T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art,
Castello di Rivoli Museo dArte Contemporanea, Turin, 2005
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
168
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
169
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
172
pp. 17278
Shibboleth, 2007
Concrete and steel
Length: 548 ft. (167 m)
Installation views, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2007
12/12/14 1:27 PM
173
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
176
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
177
12/12/14 1:27 PM
178
12/12/14 1:27 PM
179
View of Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2008
12/12/14 1:27 PM
180
pp. 18083:
Accin de Duelo, July 3, 2007
Candles
Approx. 267 350 ft. (81.4 106.7 m)
Ephemeral public project, Plaza de Bolvar,
Bogot, 2007
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
182
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
183
12/12/14 1:27 PM
184
pp. 18489
Plegaria Muda, 200810
Wood, concrete, earth, and grass
One hundred and sixty-six parts, each: 6458 84 24 in.
(164 214 61 cm); overall dimensions variable
Installation views, CAMFundao Calouste Gulbenkian,
Lisbon, 2011
pp. 19091:
One hundred and twenty-two of one hundred and sixty-six
parts, each: 6458 84 24 in. (164 214 61 cm);
overall dimensions variable
Installation view, MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century
Arts, Rome, 2012
12/12/14 1:27 PM
185
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
188
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
189
12/12/14 1:27 PM
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:27 PM
A Flor de Piel, 2014

Rose petals and thread
445 x 252 in. (1130 x 640 cm)
Installation view, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014
12/12/14 1:27 PM
193
12/12/14 1:27 PM
pp. 19497:
A Flor de Piel (details), 201112
257 421 in. (652.8 1070 cm)
Installation view, White Cube, Masons Yard, London, 2012
12/12/14 1:27 PM
195
12/12/14 1:27 PM
196
Title, Year TK
Materials TK
12/12/14 1:27 PM
197
12/12/14 1:27 PM
198
Disremembered I, 2014
Sewing needles and silk thread
35 21 6 in. (89 55 16 cm)
12/12/14 1:27 PM
199
12/12/14 1:27 PM
12/12/14 1:28 PM
201
Doris Salcedos
Readymade Time
Helen Molesworth
Sometime in the early winter of 2007, a friend and

I routed our travel through London so we could see
Doris Salcedos work in the Tate Moderns notoriously monumental Turbine Hall. A case of fortunate
happenstance had befallen me, although I did not
yet know it, in that I had heard nothing about the
work: I possessed a kind of blankness that protected
me from the critics tendency to prejudge. Walking
down into the hall, I saw at once that it was not filled
with objects, light, or media of any kind; rather, a
crack had been made in the floor, a crack that meandered and traversed its way across the entire long
hall. It was cold and dampin that up-throughyour-shoes-and-into-your-bones way that I associate
with Londonand the effect of tracing the crack,
eyes down, hands buried in pockets, was exaggerated by the hard coldness of my leather-soled shoes
against the polished, poured-concrete floor. The
crack seemed simple enoughit shifted in depth
and width, shrinking and expanding. At one moment
I looked up, and a group of small schoolchildren,
attended by two women in full burkas, made hay
of it all, jumping and skipping over the crack, prattling on, as they transformed what for me was a
solemn intervention into the space into an ersatz
playground.
This seemingly apocryphal encounter reminded
me of Marcel Duchamps Mile of String, an early
iteration of the twinning of site-specificity and
institutional critique. Duchamps 1942 contribution to the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in
New York was a maze of string, suspended from
the ceiling, and attached to the floor and walls,
making the exhibition impenetrable to conventional viewing. On opening night, when asked by a
small group of children if they could run and play
in the show, Duchamp, apparently pleased by the
3682 03 Doris Salcedo BM [mwd 12-1].indd 201
prospect, said yes. Not surprising, really; Duchamp

was a funny man who trafficked in the ludic, the
slapstick, and the puns and jokes of the schoolyard.
And while playfulness is not an affect we typically
associate with Salcedoher work has consistently
offered a meditation on plays dialectical other:
mourningthe ease with which the childrens game
brought Duchamp to mind led me to think anew
about Salcedos oeuvre as sustaining a rather highlevel conversation with various permutations of the
Duchampian readymade.
In Shibboleth (2007; pp. 17279), the bracing
title of Salcedos work in the Turbine Hall, the
poured-concrete floor is taken as a readymade. Preexisting, industrially produced, conventional beyond
measure (what says twenty-first-century art space
more clearly than a poured-concrete floor?), and just
below the thresholdof aesthetic visibility, the floor
had been emphatically chosen by Salcedo to serve as
both the site and the medium of the work. Salcedos
early work has a long history of engagement with the
readymade. Hersculptures using domestic wooden
furniturebed frames, dressers, chairsspeak to
her interest indeploying things that were already
made, rather than fashioning them anew. The typical understanding of the Duchampian readymade is
that an industrially produced object is chosen by the
artist and re-presented as a work of art. However,
Salcedo, like many artists of her generation (such as
Robert Gober and Rachel Whiteread), made incursions into the mass-produced commodity form, insisting upon her own handwork, and as such created the
philosophical conundrum of the handmade readymade. This can be seen most clearly in Salcedos
filling of pieces of old wooden furniture with wet
concrete, the result of which was a body of leaden,
lugubrious, and labored sculptures. Rendereduseless, these formerly banal objects of everyday life
of sleeping and physical comportmenttook on
new lives as art objects. They stood upright, or on
their sides, the wood aching under the weight of
the concrete. The dominant reception of this work,
and indeed of Salcedos oeuvre as a whole, has
been to see it as performing mute witness to the
state-sponsored violence of her native Colombia; as
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202
Installation view, First Papers of Surrealism, showing Marcel

Duchamps string installation, 1942
Monica Amor wrote, Salcedos works are poignant

readymades pierced by the violent narratives of
her local context.1 There can be no argument with
this approach: Salcedos art is a profound reworking
of the historical trajectory of sculptures relationship to the monument, to memorializing, and to
the explicitly public dimension of those activities.
But as is true with much writing about political
art, or, to be more precise, writing about art that
is explicit in its relationship to political content,
there has not been a fullaccounting of Salcedos
work on the readymade. Perhaps everyone thinks
the readymade is toosimple a form, perhaps discussions of form are seen to be nave in the face of the
torture of innocentcivilians by the State, perhaps
the handmade nature of Salcedos work, the clear
investment of time and labor that went into their
making, has obscured their dialogue with the logic
of industrial production that has governed so much
twentieth-century sculpture. Whatever the reasons,
critics of Salcedos work have not fully heard her
when she said, From very early on, I paid special
attention to Duchamp andBeuys.2
Its well known that instead of going to the
studio to make things, Duchamp went shopping in
the first two decades of the twentieth century, and
when he did so, he attempted to choose objects that
were devoid of his personal taste. The objects he
choseahat rack, a comb, a urinalwere meant
to be impersonal, leading Duchamp to write: The

choice of these readymades was never dictated
by esthetic delectation. This choice was based on a
reaction of visual indifferencewith at the same time
a total absence of good or bad taste.3 Elsewhere
he would claim that the objects choose him, a
furtherabdication of his authorial role, as well as
an early acknowledgment of the animistic power
of commodities to speak to us, to call out to us.
In addition to challenging the idea that the artist
must physically make his or her work, Duchamps
readymades were a subtle critique of what he called
the demand of the shopwindowthe call to consume as a way of articulating our taste, of shoring
up our identities. Similarly, Salcedos works consist
of featureless furnituresimple, wooden, without d
ecorative flourish or embellishment. And she
echoes Duchamps ambivalence about choosing as
an aesthetic act when she says, Everything precedes me, everything makes its presence felt with
such urgency that I am not the one who chooses;
my themes are given to me, reality is given to me,
the presence of each victim imposes itself.4 If
Duchamps early-twentieth-century readymades
were a challenge to the then-nascent logic of the
commodity to capture and calcify our identities,
then Salcedos late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century readymades investigate the fate of
those for whom such luxuries of the self are denied
by the ruthless imbalance of world power. Hence,
Salcedos choice of domestic artifacts can be seen
less as a Duchampian experiment with the elimination of taste (as a way of trying to circumvent commodity cultures hold on the self) than as the result
of a political system that denies the very selfhood
Duchamp seeks to critique. Salcedos furniture
has been forced into a state of anonymity, as the
individual elements have lost their identities and,
through an act of subtle but vigorous distortion,
been obligedto abandon their role as symbols of
the self and repositories of personal history.5 This
reworkingof the readymades critique is structural
to Salcedos work, appearing again and again as an
anchoring formal logic that propels her work and
expands upon the fecundity of Duchamps project
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203
of working through the relationship between art and

life and, furthermore, navigating the different temporalities that structure those negotiations.
Duchamps readymades were, for the most part,
commonplace household objects, and Salcedos
choice of simple furniture extends this decidedly
domestic tradition of the readymade. This overt
concern with the quotidian in Salcedos work harks
back to the feminist art movement of the 1970s,
which frequently politicized Duchamps readymades
by using everyday objects to examine the gendered
quality of space (such as the site-specific rooms
in Womanhouse [1972], organized by Judy Chicago
and Miriam Schapiro) and labor (the diapers and
baby clothes in Mary Kellys Post-Partum Document
[1976]). Salcedos use of furniture and clothing
evoked the bodies of those disappeared by the government, guerrillas and paramilitaries, and it did so
in part via a feminist impulse to bestow value on the
overlooked and the unseen and to resist the historical marginalization of the everyday. Salcedos work
also emerged in the wake of the appropriation artists
of the 1980s. Here the commodity was plucked out
of circulation to be reframed as an explicit object of
desire (I am thinking of Jeff Koonss vacuum cleaners and Haim Steinbachs arrangements of objects
on shelves) and to make clear the parallels between
the art object and the commodity, indeed to insist
upon their utter commensurateness. Salcedo (and
her fellow travelers Robert Gober, Fischli and Weiss,
and Rachel Whiteread) countered by offering the
handmade readymade as a retort to the smoothness
of commodity exchange, slowing it down with the
discernible tactility of the handmade. In doing so
their work made an issue of the bodythe absent
body, the body of the artist-laborer, the body of the
viewerextending Duchamps early play with the
commodity into the realm of late capitalism, a period
that had forgotten the time before the commodity
form ruled with such precision and efficacy.
Shibboleth begins with a crack in the floor, just
like any one might regularly see in a museum or
art gallery: concrete slowly opening up, giving way
to gravity, to entropy; concrete acting as a kind of
palimpsest; concrete as man-made sedimentary
rock; concrete as the stuff below our feet. But this

kind of everyday fissure grows into a full-blown
crevice, several inches wide and three feet deep, a
split that makes one aware of a hazard: Dont trip,
dont fall, dont drop your glasses, dont get your
heel caught. As the children skipped and played,
Irealized that the crack itself was a readymade; the
crack is endemic to concrete as a material, to the
structure of the floor itself: The crack was what was
going to happenwith or without the artists intervention. Just as Duchamp plucked one commodity
out of the seemingly endless stream of industrially
produced commodity goods and brought all of arts
institutional and aesthetic powers of scrutiny to bear
upon it, transforming it from something overlooked
and unseen into an object of philosophical debate,
Salcedo has taken that which was already therethe
floorand subjected it to what was already going to
happen to itits fissureand gave it a name that
already existed in the culture: Shibboleth.
A shibboleth is a linguistic effect of profound
belonging and has historically been used to ascertain the true identity of a speaker. In the Bible or
in times of war, certain pronunciations of words or
cultural meanings are used to suss out imposters
orspies. A shibboleth is language used as exclusion,
an indicator of true belonging, a gauge of the
degree to which language precedes us, a marker of
how much we enter into it, how much it shapes what
we can think and how we can think it. A shibboleth
shows us that languagedespite its extraordinary
plasticityalso functions as a readymade. The words
exist before us, and we merely choose from what is
already there. For Salcedo to call her intervention,
her riveting crack in the foundation of the museum,
Shibboleth is a way of rendering the childrens easy
schoolyard game of jumping over cracks rife with
global meanings. While a little girl might lightly hop
over the crack in the floor, will she be able to navigate the borders of nation states? Will she be able to
shift class? Will her native tongue lock her in place
or bestow upon her the unthinking framework of the
hegemonic? Will she be inside or outside the culture
of her birth, the culture she migrates to, the culture
she will, in some way, help to create?
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204
But Salcedos crack in the floor is deceptive. She

didnt merely open the floor; she filled it as well.
Looking down into the crack one could see more
concrete, plaster, and embedded chain-link mesh:
the internal guts of the building. All of this was
made by hand and laboriously inserted into the
riven gap, continuing Salcedos exploration of the
handmade readymade. Such labor-intensive work is
typical of Salcedos oeuvre, and whereas [i]n other
art works surface may be nothing but superficial
beauty. In Salcedos work, it is the unexpected site
of homage, labour, and care.6 But because we are
inured to respecting the labor of others, this facet
of her work sometimes goes unremarked upon.
Yet the handmade quality of Salcedos exploration
of the readymade is central. When Duchamp first
started buying everyday objects like kitchen stools
and bottle-drying racks as readymades, he did so
in part to expose the time of the commodity. By
arresting the commodity, he obliterated its utility
value, and when they were ultimately placed in the
museum, they entered the putative realm of timelessness. However, for Duchamp, none of this was
immediate. Indeed, he talked of the delay inherent
in the activity of choosing and presenting everyday
objects as art. In his essay The Creative Act, he
acknowledged that the artist alone could not determine what was and was not art; he or she would
have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order
that his declarations take a social value and that,
finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art
History.7 He understood that it would take time for
the viewer to complete the work,8 and he knew that
history would produce the narratives that helped to
transform the lowly commodity into a work of art.
This delay, this waiting, was part of Duchamps sly
critique of a new world governed by the logic of
speed that is the time of the commoditythe time
of ready-to-wear, the already made, the shopwindow
calling out with its siren promise of instant gratification. Duchamp was attempting to counter this
speed. In an early note from The Green Box, he muses
about trying to incorporate delay into the work itself:
Use delay instead of picture or painting, he writes.
Not so much in the different meanings in which
delay can be taken, but rather in their indecisive

reunion.9 Then, in the 1960s, when it became clear
that the original readymades were lost, or misplaced,
or discarded, Duchamp authorized his Italian dealer
Arturo Schwartz to remake them, according to blueprints okayed in Duchamps own hand. The twelve
versions of Fountain (1917/1964) that currently exist,
scattered across museum collections, were made in
an Italian factory.10 If only for a day, the production
schedule designed to meet the demand for bathroomfixtures was slowed and, instead, the philosophy of art was teased into a new way of being. The
handmade readymade, established in the1960s,
wasDuchamps updating of the readymades critiquefrom the teens. To go out shopping for everyday objects in 1917 was to do so at the moment
when domestic space was being transformed by new
commodities, it was to do so at a time when women
were being asked to change their habits of shopping,
housewifery, and self-presentation to accommodate
the new mass-produced goods.11 To not shop for
readymades in the 1960s, but rather to authorize
them to be made by hand, was an attempt at radically altering the late-capitalist nexus of factory time
and consumer time. To make readymades by hand
is to fold a wrinkle into the time of making, choosing, and presenting. It slows time down (factories
delayed and artisans employed) while also freezing
time: It permitted a bottle rack when they were no
longer in fashion; it meant a relatively faithful
recording of the objects from the teens, objects
that if simply repurchased in the 1960s would
have smacked of the new, and hence would have
deployed a different temporality than the so-called
original readymades. The handmade readymade not
only offers the artisan as the critic of the factory but
insists upon the persistence of the old as a means of
resisting capitalisms drive toward the ever-new.
If Duchamps readymades were a foiling of
commodity time, then Salcedos handmade readymades reframe the problem of postcolonial time.
Herstacks of starched white shirts, saturated with
white plaster, arranged in a pile and brutally pierced
by a steel rod, act as monuments and memorials
to the unnamed victims of the dictatorship and
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205
aramilitary violence. By asking everyday objects

p
to stand in for persons (something she did as well
in Atrabiliarios [19922004; pp. 10209], in which
discarded shoes were delicately placed into cubbyholes cut into the museum wall), Salcedo rubbed the
anonymity of Duchamps readymades against the
grain. Its not that Salcedos work ever pretended to
be able to account for specific individuals as such;
instead, the work makes an issue of the erasure of
the very idea of the individual. In this way S
alcedos
handmade readymades feel haunted, not by the
impersonality of commodity time, but by the violence of postcolonial time, in which the legacy of
conquest and domination form a long dure in which
the ideology and freedoms of democracy come at
the profound expense of those who do not possess
it. Perhaps no work concisely condenses this concern with time more than Plegaria Muda (200810;
pp.18491): a grouping of wooden tables, upon each
of which is stacked another wooden table (quantities
of tables vary, depending on venue), separated by a
thick layer of what appears to be soil. The doubled
tablesrequire vast expanses of exhibition space
the scale of a warehouseand when exhibited, the
rooms they occupy feel muffled, as if the wood and
dirt conspire together to absorb almost all sound.
The space between themwhich for some has been
a philosophical quandaryis a space of improbable
life: as the viewer approaches, the more she begins
to see blades of grass pushing upward through the
dirt, struggling to reach light. The work has a temporality outside the frame of the museum or gallery,
distinct from the time that an average viewer is
likely to spend with it. This is one of the striking
effects of postcolonial time, and how greatly it differs, for those who are crossing borders and for those
who are watching them.
The critical reception of Salcedos work has
circled largely around the problem of memorialization, and particularly of sculptures traditional role
in the transformation of memory into monuments.
We know all too well the role sculpture has played
in Western cultures fetishism of the monument:
upright, erect, anthropomorphic, phallic, patriarchal, figurative. The list of petty crimes is long.
Duchamps readymades were, in part, an attack on

this version of sculpture. His choice of everyday
objects refused the monumental, and his idiosyn
cratic placement of themnailed to the floor,
suspended from the ceilingworked against any
kind of portentousness or commemorative function.
Salcedos everyday objects, however, are suffused
with the problem of memory and commemoration.
One can narrate her project as an attempt to recuperate the monument in the name of the memorial,
to supplant hubris with modesty; to counter forgetting with the vagaries of memory; to resist denial
with knowledge. This concern with memory and
the memorial amplifies the structural role temporality plays in the logic of the readymade. Indeed,
time is such an enormous part of Salcedos project,
that Mieke Bal has argued, that Salcedo attempts
nothingless than to incorporate the temporal
dimension of history into the spatial strategies of
art.12 The inextricability of space and time (a noteworthy given in contemporary physics) can be seen
particularly clearly in Neither (2004; pp. 16065),
a site-specific installation created for White Cube
in London and now housed at Inhotim, in Belo
Horizonte, Brazil. Similar to Shibboleth, Neither is an
installation that flirts with emptiness, as the viewer
walks into a white room that appears, at first glance,
to be bare. However, close looking reveals that the
soft white plaster walls give way to a delicate web of
steelfencing that pushes out and sinks into the surface ofthe wall, an exercise in haptic subtlety that
evokesfeelings of enclosure and death, of simultaneously being buried alive or being excavated
from a delicate archeological dig. As in Shibboleth, in
Neither Salcedo has taken the architectural conventions of the art worldthe white wall that forms the
so-called autonomous white cubeand exposed the
readymade nature of its conventions, and in doing
so intimates that there is nothing more violent than
the fantasy of neutrality.13 In Neither the white wall
is ruptured by expanded mesh (the same material
used by the United States in the military prison at
Guantnamo Bay), forming an almost subconscious
appearance of the violent logic of private property
complete with barriers to entryresulting in a
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206
topographical caesura that means the walls are no

longer available for business as usual. Similarly,
the neither of the title is redolent with the force
of negation, which is further articulated by the web
of interlocking xs that make up the expanded mesh.
Once again Salcedo uses the logic of the readymade
to draw attention to the frameworks of art (concrete
floors, white walls) while also silently negotiating the
ongoing implicit violence that shores up such seemingly neutral values.
Given that Salcedo herself has said that her
work takes on with full responsibility the theme
of violence and war,14 it is perhaps no surprise that
the temporality of her work is typically framed as an
encounter with the past in the present. Many critics
have assessed the work with terms such as suspensionand delay. Olga Viso writes: The notion of delay
is indeed central to her art, and one of the intriguingcharacteristics of her sculptures is the manner
in which they record a rupture in time. Registering
suspended moments, time is simultaneously arrested
and accelerated as the past and the present violently
collide.15 And Mieke Bal argues: Salcedos answer
to monumentality, then, is to bring in time by suspending it; the suspension of time that counters
times erasure into eternity.16 This sense of times
delay or suspension resonates with Duchamps play
with time in The Large Glass (191523), a painting
that he saw, formally, as a delay in glass.17 Suspension is germane to the subject matter of The
Large Glass as well, since the painting depicts the
act of lovemaking permanently stalledthe bride
forever suspended in glass above her bachelors,
who in turn are trapped below, resigned to an eternity of unfulfilled desire. Salcedos work does seem
to suspend time, largely through its production of
silence, its dramatic quieting of experience, its hushing of language. A pronounced sense of muteness
accompanies the experience of looking at Salcedos
work, whether it involves walking around her concrete stuffed furniture, whose wooden joints can no
longer creak or scrape, or perambulating down the
long line of Shibboleth, taking in its metaphorization
of uncrossable boundaries and borders, or standing
before the haunted shirts and shoes of those who
have been forcibly and permanently silenced, or

taking in the oddly reverential hush that accompanies the putative void of Neither.
But Salcedos suspension of time firmly resists
any notion of timelessness. One of feminisms most
trenchant critiques was against ideas of timelessness,
for embedded in such ideas is the naturalization of
the way things are (women tend the home, men go
to work, etc.). Indeed, whenever Anglo American
feminism tilted toward a universal idea of woman,
it veered into the realm of the timeless and in doing
so lost much of its critical acumen.18 When Salcedos
work delays or suspends time, it neither freezes nor
jettisons it, but rather builds time into the structure of the work itself. In other words, I dont think
Salcedo is interested only in the time of the past, or
in the past as a metaphor. Rather, I think Shibboleth
anticipates what is to come: for itself, for the Tate,
for London and, ultimately, for the very idea of the
museum. The crack in the floor operates in the
realm of the imminent: it is an inevitable point in
the futurethe crack shows us the moment in time
when all of this twenty-first-century extravagance
is but a sliver in the fossil record. So while the discourse around Salcedos work tends to focus on her
marriage of past and present, on her insistence that
traces of the past persist in the present, I have come
to see her work as anticipating its own future as a
trace, or a shard, or a fragment. The concrete-filled
pieces of furniture are not only memorials to lives
lost, but they also exist as fossils in potentia. This
quality of unearthing or fossilization in the work is a
way of seeing Salcedos affective commandeering of
spaces as not only about space, per se, but also about
the inextricability of space and time. It suggests, as
Salcedo herself recently stated, that however commemorative her work might be, however evocative
of the past, however invested in pulling the threads
of the past through the weave of the present, each
pausing of time dedicated to remembrance, each
anniversary, is also an announcement of its return,
itis also a date to come.19
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207
Coda
We have grown too accustomed to weak interpretations of Duchamp, in which the readymade is art
because that artist said so, or a version of political
art that is imagined to be all content and no form.
This is partly due to the inherent deficit of language,
partly due to the easy reduction of complicated
ideas into truisms that become the lingua franca of
an art world perpetually on the move. One of the
most trenchant aspects of Salcedos practice has
been to complicate such anodyne formulations. Her
oeuvres engagement with the Duchampian readymade complicates our understanding of it. Salcedos
works anticipation of a time yet to come, her works
understanding of itself as both art for our time and
an artifact for the future is a potent release from the
stranglehold commodity time has on our culture, on
our ideas about art, on our very sense of self. Preoccupied with mourning the deaths of those who go
uncounted, unnamed, and unrecognized, S
alcedos
work offers us a vision of our own futurity and
implicitly asks us to think about the long judgment
of time. Refusing immediacy is brave, for it implies
that not all meaning is available in the moment,
or to each of us. To refuse the contemporaneity of
art is to make us aware as viewers that perhaps not
everything is for us. Salcedo herself has written:
Art speaks to the other; it addresses an other altogether other, even if it does not reach the person it is
addressing.20 Reading this reminded me of a quote
by art historian and anthropologist George Kubler:
Astronomers and historians have this in common:
both are concerned with appearances noted in the
present but occurring in the past.21 Salcedo says:
The past is the only place where we can find both
our origins and our destiny.22 This is true. And
now, as we sit surrounded by the all-encompassing
present, we can possess only curiositycuriosity
tinged with hopeabout how Salcedos handmade
readymades will pass through time, messages buried
deep within the concrete, for those whom we will
neverknow.
NOTES
1. Monica Amor, Doris Salcedo, Artforum 47, no. 6 (2009), 191.
2. Nancy Princenthal, Silence Seen, in Doris Salcedo, ed.
Carlos Basualdo (London: Phaidon, 2000), 40.
3. Marcel Duchamp, Apropos of Readymades, in The Writings
of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 141.
4. Interview with Charles Merewether 1998, in Doris Salcedo
(London: Phaidon, 2000), 134.
5. Amor, Doris Salcedo, 191.
6. Mieke Bal, Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut, in Doris
Salcedo: Shibboleth (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 61.
7. Duchamp, The Creative Act, in The Writings of Marcel
Duchamp, 138.
8. Later on in The Creative Act Duchamp writes: the
creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator
brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds
his contribution to the creative act. Ibid., 140.
9. Duchamp, The Green Box, in The Writings of Marcel
Duchamp, 26.
10. On the proliferation of the readymades, see William
Camfields excellent Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (Houston: The
Menil Collection/Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989). For more on
the logic of the handmade readymade and its many twentieth-
century practitioners, see my Part Object Part Sculpture (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005).
11. For more on Duchamp and a critique of consumption (rather
than production), see my Rrose Slavy Goes Shopping, in The
Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman, series: The Casva Seminar
Papers (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005).
12. Bal, Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut, 55.
13. My thanks to artist Steve Locke for discussions about the
violence of neutrality, particularly the violence of the white wall
in the modernist museum.
14. Interview with Charles Merewether 1998, 140.
15. Olga Viso, Doris Salcedo: The Dynamic of Violence, in
Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s (Washington,
DC: Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1996), 94.
16. Bal, Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut, 55.
17. See Duchamp, The Green Box, 26.
18. This is the now standard critique of hallmark feminist works
such as Judy Chicagos The Dinner Party, 1979.
19. Doris Salcedo, Traces of Memory: Art and Remembrance in Colombia, ReVista, Spring 2003. Accessed online
at http://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/
spring-2003/traces-memory.
20. Ibid.
21. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of
Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961),
19.
22. Salcedo, Traces of Memory: Art and Remembrance
inColombia, ReVista, Spring 2003.
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12/12/14 1:25 PM
209
The
Muted Drum: Doris
Salcedos Material Elegies
Katherine Brinson
From the outset of her career, Doris Salcedo has

devoted her creative energies to constructing material gestures of mourning. Drawing on the wrenching testimonies ofindividuals who have suffered
bereavements resulting from political oppression and
violent social contexts, she conjures the hollowed
aftermath of these unjust killings through objects
that are both reticent and searingly expressive. In
rendering lives haunted by the past, Salcedos work
has always evinced the simple fact, voiced by Susan
Sontag, that memory is, achingly, the only relation
we can have to the dead.1 This mnemonic characteralso exhorts a correction of the collective erasure
or amnesia that has denied dignified recognition
to the deaths of those who belong to the class of
the marginalized and voiceless, and therefore fall
outside official narratives of commemoration. Many
of the victims that have galvanized Salcedos work
have suffered the fate, tragically common in recent
Colombian history, of being disappeareda
vicious tool of social control that leaves relatives
in an anguished limbo between sudden loss and
any semblance of cathartic grief. Convinced that
the gravity and compassion with which we observe
mourning practices are central to our humanity,
Salcedo quietly but implacably insists that thesuffering of these victims will not be effaced. Heraffirmation of mourning as an ethical duty reflects the
principle that grief, while in some ways an intensely
introspective state, must also be a communal impulse
in which societal bonds are forged and tended.
In Salcedos recent major works Plegaria Muda
(200810; pp. 18491) and A Flor de Piel (2014;
pp.19293), her focus shifts from the stymied existence endured by survivors to the creation of ritualistic gestures of memorial. The overtly funerary
imagery of the grave and the shroud deployed in
these works marks a return to the sepulchral cast of

her installation Atrabiliarios (19922004; pp. 10209),
in which worn shoes are enshrined, r elic-like, in
wall niches. In doing so, Salcedo confronts the
paradoxical imperative that, however impossible it
might seem to find an adequate index for the ache
of bereavement, it must be urgently attempted
nonetheless; that loss must be marked and it cannot
be represented; loss fractures representation itself
and loss precipitates its own modes of expression.2
Salcedos mode of expression is, of course, visual and
material, but in seeking to describe her material evocations of grief and m
emoryher efforts to achieve
a profound cathexis without approaching sentimentality or direct illustrationshe turns to a literary
corollary. I think my work should play a role that is
similar to a funeral oration, she explains, and for
this reason every one of my pieces explores possible
ways in which to formulate a poetics of mourning.3
In addition to the eulogy, an apt comparative
for the subtle workings of this poetics of mourning might be located in the elegythe poetic
form devoted to mourning the loss of a cherished
or admired individual. A protest against deaths
injustice is characteristic of elegiac lament, but
so too is a movement toward consolation and the
affirmation oflife in the face of loss, reflecting the
cultural need to express communal sorrow, but
also to gradually attain acceptance. In a canonical
example of the genre such as Miltons Lycidas, the
pain of grief is lyrically evoked, only to be salved
by topoi of resurrection and a sympathetic natural
world. In this sense, the classic elegy reflects Freuds
paradigmatic conception of normal mourning
as a passagefrom isolated abjection to reassimilation.4 In their useof organic elements and images
of renewal and repair, Salcedos recent work suggests a possibility forregeneration that mirrors
traditionalelegiac consolation. But it would be
misplaced to identify a trajectory toward straightforward redemption or compensation in these works.
A more instructive analogylies in the conception
of the modern elegy described by Jahan Ramazani,
who posits a strain of the genrethat enacts the work
of melancholic mourning, echoing the alternate
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210
category established by Freud to distinguish a

pathological state of mourningdevoid of hope for
progressive healing. The characteristic elegy of
our time evinces the astringency of modern death
and bereavement, states Ramazani. At its best,
the modern elegy offers not a guide to successful
mourning but a spur to rethinking the vexed experience of grief in the modernworld.5
A decade ago, Salcedo undertook a task of
mourning that interlaced the legacies of mass killings in two distinct cultural contexts: the proliferation of gang-related shootings in South Central
Los Angeles, and the murder of young people from
deprived rural areas of Colombia between 2003
and 2009 by members of the Colombian army who
were incentivized by government rewards. In both
cases, the victims were living in disenfranchised,
impoverished conditions that the artist identifies
as a state ofdeath-in-life, and their actual deaths
were accordingly stripped of cultural import or recognition. The installation Plegaria Muda seeks to
counter this unmourned state with an act ofresistance against the social forces that dehumanize certain members of a community and deem their lives
all but worthless in the economy of public grief. As
viewers enter the space, they are greeted by a mass
of enigmatic structures arrayed in a dense, irregular
formation. Each unit is constructed from a perfunctory wooden table, on top of which a matching table
is inverted, its legs thrusting perversely upwards.
The two tables encase a layer of earth and, startlingly, bright green blades of grass emerge from the
underside of the upper surface, presenting a surreal
marriage of the organic and the manmade. Salcedo
has long been drawn to tables as objects suffused
with some of the most intimate moments offamily
life, using them to haunting effect in her suite of
Unland sculptures (199598; pp. 12235). In Plegaria Muda these familiar domestic objects, echoing
the proportions of the adult human body, assume
theappearance of coffins or graves.
Whereas earlier works by Salcedo suggest
the spectral return of the murdered body in traces
of clothing, bone, and hair that emerge from the
interstices and surfaces of found objects, Plegaria

Muda communicates a sense of the body safely
interred. In one aspect, the installation evokes
the chilling seriality of a mass grave, and yet each
individual object is endowed with a tender respect.
Those who have remained psychically unburied are
given a decorous burial, and thus are symbolically
returned to the perpetual cycle of dust to dust. In
contrast to the deliberate stasis of Salcedos series
of sculptures fashioned from furniture stifled with
concrete, this work immerses viewers in the sight
and smell of the actively growing grass, so that in
theplace of suffocated absence there is the generative charge and temporality of nature. There is
ambivalence, however, in this relentless advance
of the life force. The reclamation of the grass is an
agent of healing but also of forgetting. When the
battlefield and the mass grave are overtaken by
pastoral meadows, theirhorrors are dangerously
redacted.
While Plegaria Muda addresses the burden of
mourning mass killings, in 2011 Salcedo undertook
the equally daunting assignment of paying homage
to a specific victim: a nurse who was tortured to
death after a long captivity in Colombia, her body
dismembered before it could be recovered. Harrowed by the details of the case, Salcedo set out to
create an offering to this woman, one that would
be adequately inscribed with the depth of her sufferingwhile eschewing a depiction of torment so
visceral that it would collapse into an object of visual
trauma. For a task she deemed impossible, the
artist decided on an impossible object: Penelopelike, she would slowly weave an enormous burial
shrouda ritualistic covering that would reinstate
the nurturing care of her subjects profession that
had been so brutally inverted in her treatment by
her captors. And this shroud would be painstakingly hand-stitched from individual red rose petals
that would magically retain their color and supple
texture. In its notion of a protective reclamation of
the dead body, the resulting work, A Flor de Piel,
echoes the indelible iconography of Sylvia Plaths
self-elegy, Edge, written just six days before
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211
her death.The poem imagines a woman who has

reached aninviolable, perfected state at journeys
end, figuring her body as rose p
etals that enclose and
absorb the pain of loss:
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night
flower.6
In Salcedos work, too, the body itself becomes its
own shroud; the woman, once brutalized, is now
perfected.
There is, however, an oscillation between
beauty and horror in A Flor de Piel that aligns with
anabiding ambiguity in Salcedos work between
actions of damage and actions of healing. The
imagery of rupture that was most monumentally
imagined in the architectural schism of her 2007
installation S
hibboleth (pp. 17279), with its connotations of a social fabric torn, is here replaced with the
patient, almost penitential suturing of the desecrated
body, looking back to the imagery of medical and
domesticmending that has been present since the
beginning of the artists career. But as in Atrabiliarios
and the Unland works, the reparative stitch is also a
puncture, a violent interruption.7 Similarly, the first
reaction to A Flor de Piel is usually one of aesthetic
delight, as the lush romantic associations of a carpet
of red roses come to the fore. The painstaking labor
required to construct such an object inspires wonder,
as an act of fairytale logic and devotional beauty
that might seem to assuage the profound ugliness
of the subjects death. Gradually, however, these
seductive valences are overtaken by more unsettling
undertones. The russet petals, with their delicately
veined membranes, assume the guise of a human

epidermisthe flayed hide of Marsyas displayed as
a repellent trophy.8 In this summoning of the tortured body, the work succeeds in locating a material
vessel capable of communicating some of the extra-
linguistic condition of enduring extreme pain. In her
seminal study of physical suffering, Elaine Scarry
asserts that the pain of others can only be understood
when objectified by a referent outside the bodily
experience. Her vivid portrayal of the obliteration
of the self during torture correlates with the effect
of A Flor de Piel, as its undulating surface engulfs
the floor of the gallery: It is the intense pain that
destroys a persons self and world, a destruction
experienced spatially as either the contraction of the
universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body
or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.9
Scarrys notion of channeling interior agony through
an external signifiershe cites the example of
Joseph Beuyss sculpture of a bandaged knifefinds
an echo in Salcedos proclaimed ambition that her
work might communicate the texture of suffering
through the eloquent object, and in this empathic
thread achieve an experiential transference:
During the brief moment the viewer contemplates in silence the work of art, maybe then
the interrupted life of the victimpresent in
the artworkreaches out to find the memories
of pain inscribed in each viewers memory. And
in this manner, the violently interrupted life
can find a continuation in the life of the viewer,
thus creating what Franz Rosenzweig called
eternal life.10
Salcedo had previously used roses as an instrument of memorial when she joined with a group
of Bogot-based artists to commemorate the death
of the Colombian journalist, political satirist, and
peace activist Jaime Garzn, who was assassinated
by suspected right-wing paramilitary forces in 1999.
The artists selected an expanse of wall in front of
Garzns home and nailed five thousand red roses
upside down to its surface, where they remained in
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212
place as they gradually withered and died (p. 150).

In this work, the rose functioned in its traditional
role as memento mori, its decaying beauty signifying
the entropic body. In A Flor de Piel, however, the
petals seem to defy mortal vulnerability. Salcedo,
who immerses herself in lengthy periods of research
and development before creating each work, collaborated with scientists to find a way to preserve
the form of the petals and reinstate their coloration,
treating them with a complex chemical sealing process that arrests their organic disintegration. This
enchanted suspension of natures operations reflects
for the artist the status of the unrecovered bodies of
the disappeared in Colombia. It might also suggest an act of transubstantiation, as the wafer-like
rose petalsan emblem associated with the blood of
martyrs in Christian iconographyare symbolically
transmuted to flesh while simultaneously achieving
the appearance of eternal life. This gesture toward
the Eucharistic chimes with the spirit of religious
devotion that is often approached in Salcedos work;
she frequently describes her projects, with their prolonged gestations and laborious techniques, as acts
of faith, her creative process as a solitary liturgy.11
This sacramental mood is particularly vivid in the
funerary rites enacted in Plegaria Muda, with its title
denoting a silent prayer, and A Flor de Piel.
At the time of writing, Salcedo is absorbed in
the development of a new work: a public project,
as yet without a site of realization, which deals with
the troubling proliferation of mass shootings in the
United States. Titled Palimpsest (2013present;
p.208), the work proposes the creation of a plaza in
an empty city lot, from which drops of water would
emanate, gradually joining together to form the
names of the victims of gun violence. The water
disperses or is swept away by the feet of pedestrians
or the weather, only to eventually reform with the
obdurate recursion of grief. In each case, the watery
text emerges over the barely legible trace of a different name, elucidating the frustratingly cyclical
nature of such tragedies. Salcedo here harnesses
the visual power of the given name, in which an
image of the letters provokes a jolt of recognition
akin to seeing a photograph of the loved one. This

direct marking of identitya departure for the artist, but one she felt to be a necessary corrective to
the trivialization of the victims deaths in the wider
cultureis tempered by the impermanence of the
medium, recalling, perhaps, the poignant epitaph
requested by John Keats, Here lies One Whose
Name was writ in Water, with its suggestion of lost
youth and the transience of human achievement.12
In causing the ground to weep, albeit in an
urban rather than pastoral setting, Salcedos vision
for the work draws on a classic trope of elegiac
poetry in which the land itself laments the fallen
protagonist. The freighting of inanimate objects
witha sense of human sorrow has long been a defining characteristic of Salcedos sculpture, but the
recent presence of organic elements such as grass,
flowers, and water brings this pathetic fallacy closer
to its traditional definition. John Ruskin elucidated
the phenomenon as the perception of the world
colored by subjective emotions, and significantly,
hisfamous exemplum of the poetic phrase the
cruel, crawling foam focuses on the experiential
distortions of mourning:
The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl.
The state of mind which attributes to it these
characters of a living creature is one in which the
reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings
have the same effect. They produce in us a
falseness in all our impression of external things,
which I would generally characterize as the
Pathetic Fallacy.13
Salcedo similarly conjures the wholesale transformation of the world through the lens of loss. The concept for Palimpsest originated in a series of interviews
she conducted with American mothers who had lost
children to gun violence. The figure of the bereaved
mother has always been of central importance to the
artist, and in her conversations with these women
she was struck anew by societys indifference to
their daily suffering. As the artist points out, unlike
mourning, melancholia does not pass,14 and the
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213
eternally weeping stone of Palimpsest embodies

their melancholic myopia, functioning as a figureless Piet.
This refusal to minimize the magnitude
and resilience of grief does not, however, render
Salcedos elegaic objects nihilistic. Judith Butler points out that the communication of such
emotions, far from inviting resignation or despair,
may be understood as the slow process by which
we develop a point of identification with suffering
itself and as such can be a point of departure for a
newunderstanding if the narcissistic preoccupation
of melancholia can be moved into a consideration
of the vulnerability of others. Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under
which certain human lives are more vulnerable than
others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others.15 The same stance of opposition
forms a fundamental tenet of Salcedos practice. She
unabashedly articulates the desire that her works
should not represent mourning but rather facilitate
an experience of mourning itself, and that within
such an experience, our essential communality
might be continually reaffirmed.
NOTES
1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador,
2003), 115.
2. Judith Butler, Afterword: After Loss, What Then? in Loss:
The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 467.
3. Doris Salcedo, unpublished proposal for Palimpsest
(2013present).
4. See Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in On the
History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement Papers on Metapsychology
and Other Works, vol. XIV, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud
(Toronto: Hogarth Press Limited, 1957), 24358.
5. I am indebted to Jahan Ramazanis illuminating study of the
elegy, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy From Hardy to Heaney
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ix.
6. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York:
Harper and Row, 1981 [1960]), 2723.
7. The traditional mourning rite of weaving a shroud or burial
clothes is also the foundation of a 2014 body of work by Salcedo
titled Disremembered, in which she constructs tunics from thousands of burnt needles. From a distance the object appears to be
woven from a shimmering silk but closer inspection reveals it to
be a garment that would torment the wearer. As in A Flor de Piel,
a disjunction is present between the constructive elegiac act of
weaving and an imaging of the excruciation of loss.
8. This reading is supported by the works title. Translated literally as On the surface of the skin, it is also an idiomatic phrase
that denotes the display of passionate emotions.
9. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985), 35.
10. Doris Salcedo in discussion with the author, June 20, 2014.
11. Ibid.
12. Keats requested that his grave be marked with no name
or date beyond this phrase, but his friends Joseph Severn and
Charles Brown had the stone erected in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome engraved with the text: This Grave/contains all
that was Mortal/of a/Young English Poet/Who/on his Death
Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart/at the Malicious Power of
his Enemies/Desired/these Words to be/engraven on his Tomb
Stone:/Here lies One/Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February
1821.
13. John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Modern Painters,
Vol. III (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1905), 155.
14. Correspondence with the author, June 20, 2014.
15. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 30.
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215
A Work in Mourning
Doris Salcedo
A version of this essay was published as Silent Prayer

on the occasion of the artists receiving the Hiroshima Art
Prize for Peace in 2014.
The first step I take in the making of a work of art
is to orient myself toward the victim to whom I
address the piece, and whose experience is a prerequisite for the very existence of the work. The
experience of an individual is always my point of
departure. But during the process of making an artwork, I must maintain a distance in order to leave
that person intact, untouched. And from there, as
soon as I begin working, everything enters into the
paradoxical terrain of art.
My work departs from the singularity of a lived
experience but en route, effaces that experience. As
Paul Celan wrote, The man whose eyes and mind
are occupied with art . . . forgets about himself. Art
makes for distance from the I. Art requires that we
travel a certain space in a certain direction, on a
certain road.1
The experiences I attempt to address are not
anecdotes. My work is about the memory of experience, which is always vanishing, not about experiences taken from life. It is the vacuum generated by
forgetfulness, an attempt to grasp what is no longer
present. The work of art is concerned precisely
with that which is not an event. It points toward an
event, or, as the philosopher Jean Luc Nancy said, in
a work of art, an event and eternity coincide in the
intensity of its image.2
The events addressed within my artworks
are in the process of appearing and disappearing,
and therefore, they can never be fully present. As
Jacques Derrida said, art articulates what is no
longer and what is not yet.3 My sculptures are the
only locus where these distant events take place.
The only concern of my work is what happens
to human beings assaulted by violence. In all of
my work, I have addressed only one issue: political

violence. Nancy has said: Politics begins and ends
with bodies.4
Because I strongly believe that violence defines
the ethos of our society, I have focused on political
violence not simply because I am Colombian
which, in a way, gives me a deeper and closer knowledge of its effectsbut because of its more than
sixty years in constant war.
The epic, mechanized scale of death that has
characterized the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has become systematically produced and thoroughly inscribed into our everyday lives. Savage and
intolerable conditions are forced upon our society,
requiring humanitys mass absorption of its own
utter brutality, which reduces the demise of an individual to their utmost insignificance through desecration. With each life that abruptly ends at the hand
of the prevailing instruments of power and capital,
the industrial destruction of human beings that perpetuates endlessly expanding cycles of emotional
wreckage registers the most profoundly cruel end
ofa person that humanity can possibly know.
Art, on the other hand, can inscribe in our life
a different kind of passage, that is, from suffering
to signifying loss. For this reason, the experience of
mourning has been the central tenet in my art for the
past thirty years. During this time I have remained
immersed in mourning, and my work has been the
work of mourning, and a topology of mourning. The
only possible response I can give in the face of irreparable absence is to produce images capable of conveying incompleteness, lack, and emptiness.
I hope for my work to perform a role similar to
that of the funeral oration. Nancy writes that funeral
oration gives the ruined world its dignity as world
[and] to the proper name deprived of sense it gives
the totality of sense.5 A work of art as funeral oration explores possible ways in which to formulate
a poetics of mourning. Our very humanity resides
within the devotion or contempt that we assign to
our practices, processes, and rituals of mourning.
An aesthetic view of death reveals an ethical view
of life, and it is for this reason that there is nothing
more human than mourning.
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216
A work of art as funeral oration not only affirms

the work of mourning, it is what Nouri Gana calls
a work in mourning.6 It attempts to give back
the sense, meaning, and form that violence took
away from its victims, the unmourned dead of the
past. Nancy adds that this poetics of mourning also
givesrise to that strange turmoil of crossing through
life for nothingbut not exactly in a pure loss.7
The immensity of mourning defines our limits; it marks a restricted space where there is no
access, a border we are not permitted to cross over, a
space separate from our lives by cuts, ruptures, and
wounds. And it is within these boundaries that Ihave
tried to inscribe my work, marking specific sites for
remembrance where acts of mourning can take place.
Through my work, I have tried to explore
the relationships that can be established between
images of violence and the images and memories we
have of a deceased person. This encounter is both
a confrontation and an embrace, and all of my work
straddles this fragile line. I have tried to inscribe my
work precisely at the threshold where this absence
makes itself present, a threshold that simultaneously
separates and unites these images.
In spite of the fact that I am a sculptor, working
with solid matter, I perceive this fragile threshold as
something untouchable, like an image or a wound.
A recent work, A Flor de Piel (2014; pp. 19293), is
concerned with this untouchable aspect of a wound.
It started with the simple intention of making a
flower offering to a victim of torture in an attempt
to perform the funerary ritual that was denied her.
The genesis of A Flor de Piel arose when I began
to wonder: how could I initiate even the slightest
movement toward a tormented body, even if only
to present a flower offering? At this point I began
looking for the most fragile way of touching the
untouchable, and the process of making this piece
pushed me to find the limits of the fragile and the
most delicate within the frame of sculpture. It was
at the outer limits of fragility that Iencountered a
vulnerable body.
The realization of A Flor de Piel representedthe
most difficult challenge I have ever encountered:
trying to preserve rose petals in a stage that is
either dead nor alive. I treated them so they remain

n
suspended between the animate and the inanimate.
I knitted a shroud made of rose petals that are
sutured to one another. To me, making this piece
represented the unattainable aim of shrouding
bodies torn away from life and never properly delivered to death. It is a delicate and almost insubstantial piece. Not quite an object, it stands removed
from the world of objects, and in a way, what defines
this piece is our gaze, our relationship with it. It is a
thin, ephemeral shroud; it is an interface that allowed
me to come near the broken bodies of torture.
The body of a disappeared, tortured person
remains among us. Nancy reminds us, one should
not submit the dead entirely to death. . . . They are
well and truly in the world, in molecules or in atoms
caught up in different combinations, different crystallizations; they are also in the community . . . that
shares this small part of being. . . .8 Their presence
is insurmountable, it looms large over our reality,
and for this reason the expansive nature of this piece
is one of its essential features. A Flor de Piel makes
possible the idea of coming close to touching while
making evident the impossibility of a caress, of healing, and of saving from the abyss of death.
The industrial production of violent death lies
beyond the scope of art. Marie-Jos Mondzain writes
that death cannot be represented because it is the
ultimate profanity, and as such it escapes all symbolization. Death is not representable, and for this
reason, in art it is substituted, not by the category
of emptiness but of a hollowing out.9 Its content,
argues Mondzain, should be emptied out to allow it
to appear anew in the time and space of the sacred.
Perhaps what art can represent is the death
of death. The impetus for another work, Plegaria
Muda (200810; pp. 18491), began in 2004 when I
embarked on a trip around southeast Los Angeles.
I researched official reports stating that over the
course of a twenty-year period, more than 10,000
young people had suffered violent deaths on the
streets of L.A., and during this time, I began to
wonder if art could represent a death of death.
As I focused my attention on the violence caused
by gangs, of particular interest was the murky
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217
r elationship between the role of killer and that of

the victim. I realized that this perverse swapping that
flowed between these roles was possible because
both of them inhabit a specific grey area within
our society, the space that some writers have called
social death or death in life, which is experienced by people living in deprived areas under
extremely precarious conditions. The consequences
of these conditions are so profoundly tragic, that one
can easily see the connection that exists between
this so-called social death and the subsequent violent, anonymous, physical death thatis carried out
by members of these communities. The conditions
that generate this social death are similar all over the
world, whether in Los Angeles orBogot.
In Plegaria Muda, I try to articulate a series of
violent events that have determined the unstoppable
spiral of mimetic and fratricidal violence that equally
marks out gang violence, internal conflicts, or civil
wars all over the world.
Plegaria Muda is my response to events that
occurred in Colombia between 2003 and 2009, during which time 2,500 young people from deprived
areas were murdered by the Colombian army and
then presented as unidentified guerrillas: discharged in combat. For months, I accompanied a
group of mothers who were searching for their disappeared sons, and identifying them in the graves
where they had been abandoned. The death of each
of these young men generates an absence and each
absence demands that we take responsibility for
those who have been forcibly made absent. Since
our relationship with them does not end with their
death, the only way that they can exist is within us;
our relation with them does not end with their dead,
it lives on as grief. Hans-Jost Frey argues that in the
face of death, the end of our hope survives as mourning, as a sign of the infinite incompleteness of our
relationship with the dead.10
Colombiathe country of unburied dead
has hundreds of unidentified mass graves where
the dead remain nameless. For this very reason, I
inscribed the image of the grave within this piece,
creating a space for remembrance, a graveyard that
opens up a space for each body. Nancy defines
injustice as the mixing, breaking, crushing, and

stifling of bodies, making them indistinct (gathered
up in a dark center, piled up to eliminate the space
between them, within themassassinating even the
space of their just death).11 Plegaria Muda highlights
each tomb individually despite the fact that not one
of them bears the mark of a name. Each piece has
been sealed and has an individual character, as if a
funerary ritual has taken place. The implacable and
obsessive repetition of the tomb emphasizes the
painful repetition of unnecessary deaths.
I hope that my work can cross through history
to make present the extreme experiences that lay
forgotten in the past. Emmanuel Lvinas argues that
The totality of being in which shines forth as meaning is not an entity fixed for eternity but requires the
arranging and assembling, the cultural act, of man12
and I would add that it requires an artist to think
across and beyond disaster.
NOTES
1. Paul Celan,The Meridian, from Collected Prose, trans.
Rosemarie Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 44.
2. Jean-Luc Nancy The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 10.
3. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work
of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), 30.
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 73.
5. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity,
trans. Bettina Bergo (New York: Fordham University Press,
2008), 100.
6. Nouri Gana, Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative
Mourning (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 125.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity,
trans. Bettina Bergo (New York: Fordham University Press,
2008), 103.
8. Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of ChristianityII,
trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press,
2013), 91.
9. Marie-Jos Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143.
10. Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996), 75.
11. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 47.
12. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Studies
in Continental Thought) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996), 42.
12/12/14 1:25 PM
218
EXHIBITION HISTORY
Compiled by Steven L. Bridges
Born in Bogot in 1958
Lives and works in Bogot
1980

1984
1987

198788

198991

1993
1995
2005
2006

2008

2010

2014

Bachelor of Fine Art, Universidad de Bogot Jorge

Tadeo Lozano
Master of Arts, New York University
Premiodel XXXISaln Nacionalde Artistas
Colombianos, Medelln, Colombia
Director, School of Plastic Arts, Instituto de Bellas
Artes, Cali, Colombia
Professor of Sculpture and Art Theory,
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogot
Penny McCall Foundation Grant
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant
The Ordway Prize, Penny McCall Foundation
Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, San Francisco
Art Institute
Honorary Doctorate, Universidad Nacional de
Colombia, Bogot
Premio Velzquez de las Artes Plsticas,
The Spanish Ministry of Culture
9th Hiroshima Art Prize, Hiroshima City Museum
of Contemporary Art
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Unland/Doris Salcedo: New Work, San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art (exh. broch.)
Untitled, August 20, 1999, Ephemeral public project, Bogot
2000
Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, Alexander and Bonin, New York
2001
Doris Salcedo, Camden Arts Centre, London (exh. broch.)
2002
Noviembre 6 y 7, Ephemeral public project, Palace of Justice,
Bogot
2004
Neither, White Cube, Hoxton Square, London (exh. cat.)
2007
Accin de Duelo, July 3, 2007, Ephemeral public project, Plaza
de Bolvar, Bogot
Doris Salcedo, White Cube, Hoxton Square, London (exh. cat.)
Shibboleth, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (exh. cat.)
2008
Doris Salcedo, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Neither, InhotimInstituto deArte Contemporneae Jardim
Botnico, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
1994
La Casa Viuda, Brooke Alexander, New York
2011
Plegaria Muda, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporneo,
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, Mexico City;
traveled to Moderna Museet, Malmo, Sweden (2011);
Centro de Arte Moderna, Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian
Lisbon (2011); Museo Nazionale delle Arti XXI Secolo
(MAXXI), Rome (2012); and Pinocoteca, So Paulo (2012)
(exh. cat.)
1995
La Casa Viuda VI, White Cube, Duke Street, London
2012
Doris Salcedo, White Cube, Masons Yard, London
1996
Atrabiliarios, L.A. Louver Gallery, Los Angeles
Doris Salcedo, Le Creux de lenfer, Centre dart contemporain,
Thiers, France
Doris Salcedo, Galeria Camarco Vilaa, So Paulo
2014
Hiroshima Art Prize Commemorative Exhibition, Hiroshima City
Museum of Contemporary Art (exh. cat.)
Plegaria Muda, FLORA ars + natura, Bogot
1985
Nuevos Nombres, Casa de Moneda, Bogot (exh. cat.)
1990
Doris Salcedo, Galera Garcs Velsquez, Bogot (exh. cat.)
1997
Doris Salcedo: Atrabiliarios, Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art,
Wichita State University, Kansas (exh. broch.)
1998
Doris Salcedo: Unland, SITE Santa Fe; traveled to New
Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (exh. cat.)
1999
Doris Salcedo: Unland, Tate Gallery, London (exh. broch.)
2015
Doris Salcedo, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; traveled
to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Prez
Art Museum Miami (2016) (exh. cat.)
Selected Group Exhibitions
1987
XXXI Saln Nacional de Artistas Colombianos, Antiguo
Aeropuerto Olaya Herrera, Medelln, Colombia
12/12/14 1:25 PM
219
1988
Saln Nuevas Tendencias, Galera de Arte Ventana, Cali,
Colombia
Seleccin del Saln Nacional, Biblioteca Luis ngel Arango,
Bogot
1989
Concurso Nacional de Arte, Ro Grande, Museo de Arte Moderno,
Medelln, Colombia
El Hierro, Galera Garcs Velsquez, Bogot (exh. cat.)
1990
Arte Colombiano de los 80s: Obras tridimensionales, Centro
Colombo Americano, Bogot
Nuevos nombres seguimiento, Biblioteca Luis ngel Arango,
Bogot (exh. cat.)
1991
New Acquisitions, Biblioteca Luis ngel Arango, Bogot
1992
Ante Amrica, Biblioteca Luis ngel Arango, Bogot; traveled
to Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero, Caracas (1993);
Queens Museum of Art, New York (1993); Centro Cultural
de la Raza, San Diego (1993); Center for the Arts Yerba
Buena Gardens, San Francisco (1994); Spencer Museum
of Art, Lawrence, Kansas (1994); Museo de Arte y Diseo
Contemporneo, San Jos, Costa Rica (1994) (exh. cat.)
The Boundary Rider, 9th Biennale of Sydney (exh. cat.)
Currents 92: The Absent Body, Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston
Ulf Rollof, Doris Salcedo, Cecile Huber, Lilliana Moro, Marianna
Uutinen, Shedhalle Zurich (exh. cat.)
1993
Aperto 93: Emergenza, 45th Venice Biennale, Italy (exh.cat.)
Building a Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Matthew Benedict, Willie Cole, Jim Hodges, Doris Salcedo, Brooke
Alexander, New York
Sculpture and Multiples, Brooke Alexander, New York
1994
Cocido y Crudo, Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid
(exh. cat.)
Points of Interest, Points of Departure, John Berggruen Gallery,
San Francisco
Sculpture, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
The Spine, de appel arts centre, Amsterdam (exh. cat.)
Willie Doherty/Mona Hatoum/Doris Salcedo, Brooke Alexander,
New York
1995
52nd Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (exh. cat.)
About Place: Recent Art of the Americas, Art Institute of Chicago
Sleeper: Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Guillermo Kuitca,
Doris Salcedo, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
(exh.cat.)
1996
Dissonant Wounds: Zones of Display/Metaphors of Atrophy, Hessel
Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson,
New York (exh. broch.)
Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s, Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (exh. cat.)
Domenico Bianchi: Recent Works, Peter Shelton: Mreubu, Doris
Salcedo: Atabiliarios, L.A. Louver Gallery, Los Angeles
(exh.cat.)
Propositions, Muse departemental dart contemporain de
Rochechouart, France (exh. cat.)
The Visible & The Invisible: Representing the Body in Contemporary Art and Society, Institute of International Visual Arts at
St.Pancras Church, London
1997
As est la cosa: Instalacin y arte objeto en Amrica Latina, Centro
Cultural Arte Contemporneo, Mexico City (exh. cat.)
Body, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (exh. cat.)
The Hirshhorn Collects: Recent Acquisitions, Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (exh. cat.)
New Work: Words & Images, Miami Art Museum
Selections from the Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York
1998
Claustrophobia, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom
(exh. cat.)
Displacements: Mirosaw Baka, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread,
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (exh. cat.)
Eugenio Dittborn, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, Doris Salcedo,
Alexander and Bonin, New York
From Head to Toe: Concepts of the Body in Twentieth Century Art,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Roteiros, 24th So Paulo Biennial (exh. cat.)
Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art,
Moderna Museet, Stockholm (exh. cat.)
1999
Arte y violencia en Colombia desde 1948, Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogot (exh. cat.)
Modern Starts: Places, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art (exh. cat.)
2000
Age of Influence: Reflections in the Mirror of American Culture,
Converge, Miami Art Museum
Making Choices: In the Marriage of Reason and Squalor, Museum
of Modern Art, New York
Of the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Open Ends, Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art and
Projeto Ax, Museo de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador da
Bahia, Brazil (exh. cat.)
Still, Alexander and Bonin, New York
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220
2001
ARS 01: Unfolding Perspectives, Museum of Contemporary Art
Kiasma, Helsinki (exh. cat.)
Eztetyka del sueo, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa,
Madrid (exh. cat.)
Lugares de la memoria, Espai dArt Contemporani de Castell,
Castelln de la Plana, Spain
2002
Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (exh. cat.)
Imagine, You Are Standing in Front of Me: Caldic Collectie,
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (exh. cat.)
Lateral Thinking: Art of the 1990s, Museum of Contemporary
Art, San Diego (exh. cat.)
Sculpture, Alexander and Bonin, New York
The Unthought Known, White Cube, Hoxton Square, London
(exh. cat.)
2003
Poetic Justice, 8th International Istanbul Biennial (exh. cat.)
Il racconto del filo: cucito e ricamo nellarte contemporanea,
Museo dArte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rovereto, Italy
(exh.cat.)
2004
Contemporary Art and Latin America: Selections from the Diane
and Bruce Halle Collection, Tucson Museum of Art; traveled to Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University,
Greencastle, Indiana (exh.cat.)
the gallery selects . . . , Alexander and Bonin, New York
MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the
Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio,
New York (exh. cat.)
2005
Beyond Delirious: Architecture in Selected Photographs from the Ella
Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami
Cantos Cuentos Colombianos, Daros Latinamerica, Zurich
(exh.cat.)
inSites_05: Farsites/Sitios distantes, San Diego Museum of Art
and Centro Cultural Tijuana (exh. cat.)
The Pantagruel Syndrome, T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art,
Castello di Rivoli Museo dArte Contemporanea, Turin
(exh. cat.)
2006
Anos 80: Uma Topologia, Museu de Serralves, Porto, Portugal
Portrait/Embodiment/Homage, Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts,
St. Louis (exh. broch.)
Re: Location, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Wrestle, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies,
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
2007
Constructing a Poetic Universe: The Diane and Bruce Halle Collection of Latin American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(exh. cat.)
Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of

Art, Dallas Museum of Art (exh. cat.)
2008
Exclusiones/Censorship, Galera Moiss Prez de Albniz,
Pamplona, Spain (exh. cat.)
NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, Menil Collection, Houston; traveled to MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center,
Long Island City, New York (exh. cat.)
2010
Assumptions, Galleri F-15, Moss, Norway
Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Feeling What No Longer Is, A.I.R. Gallery, New York
Hospitality: Receiving Strangers, Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland
(exh. cat.)
The New Dcor, Hayward Gallery, London (exh. cat.)
2011
Crisisss Amrica Latina: Arte y confrontacin, 19102010, Museo
del Palacio de Bellas Artes and Ex Teresa Arte Actual,
Mexico City (exh. cat.)
New Order, White Cube, Masons Yard, London
TRA. Edge of Becoming, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice
2012
Inhabited Architecture, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
The Residue of Memory, Aspen Art Museum (exh. cat.)
Silence, The Menil Collection, Houston; traveled to Berkeley
Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of Berkeley, California (2013) (exh. cat.)
Stimuli: Prints and Multiples, Alexander and Bonin, New York
This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, Museum
of Contemporary Art Chicago; traveled to Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis (2012); and Institute for Contemporary Art,
Boston (2012) (exh. cat.)
2013
Cantos Cuentos Colombianos, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro
(exh.cat.)
Lasting Images, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Order, Chaos, and the Space Between: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Diane and Bruce Halle Collection, Phoenix Art
Museum (exh. cat.)
Robert Kinmont/Doris Salcedo, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Sculpture in the Close, Jesus College, Cambridge, United
Kingdom
Uno lo mo y lo tuyo: Tres dcadas de arte en expansion, 1980 al
presente, Museo del Banco de la Repblica, Bogot
2014
93, Centro Galego de Arte Contempornea, Santiago de
Compostela, Spain
Art from the Mid-20th Century, Worcester Art Museum,
Massachusetts
FamiliarAltered, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Les gueules casses, Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany
12/12/14 1:25 PM
221
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Janine Antoni, Christine Borland, Willie Doherty, Pepe Espaliu,
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1989
El Hierro: Escultura. Bogot: Galera Garcs Velsquez, 1989.
Exh. cat.
1995
Armstrong, Richard, and Paolo Morsiani. Carnegie International
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Robert Gober, Guillermo Kuitca, Doris Salcedo. San Diego:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995. Exh. cat.
Grynsztejn, Madeleine, and Dave Hickey. About Place: Recent
Art of the Americas: The 76th American Exhibition, The Art
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(Summer 1995): 1625.
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1990
Ospina, Nadin. Nuevos nombres: Seguimiento. Bogot: Biblioteca
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and Reb Butler. 1992. Boston: Institute for Contemporary
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Burke, Gregory. The Boundary Rider: the 9th Biennale of
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1994
Amor, Monica. Doris Salcedo. ArtNexus 13 (AugustOctober
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Cameron, Dan. Absence Makes the Art: Doris Salcedo.
Artforum 33, no. 2 (October 1994): 8891.
Cotter, Holland. Art in Review: Doris Salcedo. New York
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Hirsch, Faye. Doris Salcedo at Brooke Alexander. Art in
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Morgan, Stuart. The Spine: de Appel, Amsterdam. Frieze 16
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1996
Benezra, Neal, and Olga M. Viso. Distemper: Dissonant Themes
in the Art of the 1990s. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1996.
Exh.cat.
Domenico Bianchi: Recent Works; Peter Shelton: Mereubu;
Doris Salcedo: Atrabiliarios. Venice Beach: L.A. Louver
Gallery, 1996. Exh. cat.
Gutierrez, Natalia. Conversation with Doris Salcedo.
ArtNexus 23 (JanuaryMarch 1996): 4850.
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of Emergence. In Rethinking Borders, edited by John C.
Welchman, 10124. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Pini, Ivonne. Rodrigo Facundo, Juan F. Herran y Doris
Salcedo: Al rescate de la memoria. Atlntica:Revistade arte
y pensamiento 15 (Winter 1996): 98104.
Vicario-Heras, Gilbert. Dissonant Wounds: Zones of Display/
Metaphors of Atrophy. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for
Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 1996. Exh. broch.
Young, Lisa Jaye. Spiritual Minimalism. Performing Arts
Journal 18, no. 2 (May 1996): 4452.
1997
Bradley, Jessica. Doris Salcedo: La Casa Viuda II. Toronto: Art
Gallery of Ontario, 1997. Exh. broch.
Cameron, Dan. Unland: Doris Salcedo. Grand Street 61 (July
1997): 7281.
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Littman, Robert, Kurt Hol, and Jess Fu. As est la cosa: instalacin y arte objeto en Amrica Latina. Mexico City: Centro
Cultural Arte Contemporneo, 1997. Exh. cat.
Marcoci, Roxana, Diana Murphy, and Eve Sinaiko. New Art.
New York: H.N. Abrams, 1997.
McAllister, Jane, and Nancy Eickel. The Hirshhorn Collects:
Recent Acquisitions 19921996. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
1997. Exh. cat.
Merewether, Charles. The Unspeakable Condition of Figuration. In Body, edited by Anthony Bond, 15160. Melbourne: Bookman Schwartz, 1997. Exh. cat.
Merewether, Charles, and David Moos. Doris Salcedo: Atrabiliarios. Wichita, KS: Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, 1997.
Exh.cat.
Pini, Ivonne. The Past as Subjective Experience. ArtNexus
23 (JanuaryMarch 1997): 5256.
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23354. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
1998
Anastas, Rhea. Doris Salcedo: A Tour of the Borderland of
Unland. ArtNexus 29 (AugustOctober 1998): 10405.
Arratia, Euridice. Doris Salcedo. Flash Art 31, no. 202 (October 1998): 122.
Bradley, Jessica, and Andreas Huyssen. Displacements: Mirosaw
Baka, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread. Toronto: Art Gallery
of Ontario, 1998. Exh. cat.
Cahmi, Leslie. Last Supper. The Village Voice 43, no. 15 (April
1998): 125.
Cameron, Dan. Unland/Doris Salcedo. New York: New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998. Exh. broch.
Cameron, Dan, Charles Merewether, and Doris Salcedo. Doris
Salcedo. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art,
1998. Exh. cat.
Chin, Daryl. Beau geste. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and
Art 20, no. 2 (May 1998): 5761.
Dault, Gary Michael. The Deafening Silence of the Past
Given Voice in Art. Globe and Mail (Toronto), April 18,
1998, C1617.
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Art. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1998. Exh. cat.
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Fundao Bienal de So Paulo, 1997. Exh.cat.
MacDonnell, Virginia. Noli me tangere: Displacements at the
AGO. Espace 45 (Autumn 1998): 3436.
Schwabsky, Barry. Doris Salcedo. Artforum 37, no. 1
(September 1998): 153.
Smith, Roberta. The New New Museum, with a Tableau of

Wrenching Reality. New York Times, March 20, 1998, E35.
1999
Bond, Anthony. TRACE: 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary
Art. Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art in
association with Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1999. Exh. cat.
Gigli, Nicoletta Cobolli. Gran tour destate. Arte 311 (July
1999): 6677.
Israel, Nico. XXIV Bienal de So Paulo. Artforum 37, no. 6
(February 1999): 103.
Mac Giolla Leith, Caoimhin. Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. Artforum 38, no. 4 (December 1999): 158.
Merewether, Charles, Doris Salcedo, and Gary Garrels.
Unland. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1999. Exh. broch.
Schubert, Karsten. The 1998 Bienal, So Paulo. Burlington
Magazine 141, no. 1150 (January 1999): 6162.
Zea de Uribe, Gloria, and lvaro Medina, eds. Arte y violencia
en Colombia desde 1948. Bogot: Museo de Arte Moderno de
Bogot, 1999. Exh. cat.
2000
Cotter, Holland. Art in Review: Doris Salcedo. New York
Times, November 17, 2000, E41.
Godfrey, Tony. Liverpool Biennial. Burlington Magazine 142,
no. 1162 (January 2000): 5355.
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(November 1999January 2000): 11415.
Morin, France. The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life,
Contemporary Art, and Projeto Ax. Art Journal 59, no. 3
(2000): 417.
Morin, France, and John Alan Farmer. The Quiet in the Land:
Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and Projeto Axe. Salvador,
Brazil: Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, 2000. Exh. cat.
Oguibe, Olu. Doris Salcedo. In Fresh Cream: Contemporary
Art in Culture. London: Phaidon, 2000.
Princenthal, Nancy, Andreas Huyssen, Carlos Basualdo, and
Doris Salcedo. Doris Salcedo. London: Phaidon, 2000.
Salcedo, Doris. Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Tate:
TheArt Magazine 21 (2000): 84.
Sussman, Elisabeth. Report from Liverpool: Britannias Biennial. Art in America 88, no. 7 (July 2000): 55, 57, 59.
Varnedoe, Kirk, Paola Antonelli, and Joshua Siegel. Modern
Contemporary: Art at MoMA since 1980. New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 2000.
2001
Bal, Mieke. Sticky Images: The Foreshortening of Time
in an Art of Duration. In Time and the Image, edited by
Carolyn Bailey Gill, 7999. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2001.
Ballester, Mara ngeles Arazo. Lugares de la memoria: Claustros
de la comunidad Valenciana. Valencia: Consorci de Museus de
la Comunidad Valenciana, 2001. Exh. cat.
Bennet, Jill, and Doris Salcedo. Doris Salcedo. London: Camden Arts Centre, 2001. Exh. broch.
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Holmes, Pernilla. Art in the Shadow of War: Doris Salcedo

and Sophie Ristelhueber. Art Review 53 (November 2001):
88.
Jimnez, Carlos. Los duelos ocultos del silencio. Lapiz 20,
no. 174 (June 2001): 1825.
Merewether, Charles. Abandonment: On the Furniture of
Doris Salcedo. In ARS 01: Unfolding Perspectives, edited by
Maria Hirvi, 21415. Helsinki: Museum of Contemporary
Art Kiasma, 2001. Exh. cat.
. Despus de los hechos. In Eztetyka del sueo, edited
by Tim Yohn, 13738. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofa, 2001. Exh. cat.
Olmo, Santiago B. Aezthetyks of Dream: The Identity of
Shortage. ArtNexus 41 (AugustOctober 2001): 9497.
Roca, Jos. Flora necrologica. Lapiz 20, no. 178 (December
2001): 5865.
Smith, Dan. Doris Salcedo/Sophie Ristelhueber/JoseDavila.
Art Monthly 251 (November 2001): 3335.
Trskman, Tomas Ivan. ARS 01. Nu: The Nordic Art Review 3,
no. 6 (2001): 63.
Walen, Audrey. Doris Salcedo. Sculpture 20, no. 4 (May
2001): 6970.
Wong, Edlie L. The Afterlife of Loss: Situating Memory in
the Sculptural Art of Doris Salcedo. Critical Sense 9, no. 1
(Winter 2001): 5585.
2002
Bennett, Jill. Art, Affect, and the Bad Death: Strategies for
Communicating the Sense Memory of Loss. Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (September 2002):
33351.
Birnbaum, Daniel. The Unthought Known: Miroslaw Balka, Doris
Salcedo, Clay Ketter, Robert Gober, Luc Tuymans. London: Jay
Jopling/White Cube, 2002. Exh. cat.
Carrozzini, Stefania. Documenta 11: Larte sotto il segno
della propaganda politica. DArs 42, no. 170 (August 2002):
1625.
Congdon, Kristin G., and Kara Kelley Hallmark. Artists from
Latin American Cultures: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
de Goede, Jannet, and Boris Groys. Imagine, You Are Standing
Here in Front of Me: Caldic Collectie, edited by Jaap Guldemond and Sven Lutticken. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2002. Exh. cat.
Doherty, Claire. The Unthought Known. Art Monthly 255
(April 2002): 2527.
Godfrey, Tony. Liverpool Biennial. Burlington Magazine 144,
no. 1196 (November 2002): 70103.
Hunt, Ian. The Unthought Known. Frieze 68 (Summer
2002): 117.
Jimnez, Carlos. The Globalization Documenta. ArtNexus
46 (OctoberDecember 2002): 6470.
Kamps, Toby. Lateral Thinking: Art of the 1990s. San Diego:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002. Exh. cat.
McNeill, David. Documenta 11 Takes on the Masters of the
Universe. Artlink 22, no. 4 (December 2002): 2831.
Searle, Adrian. World of Interiors. Guardian (London),

March 12, 2002, 1011.
Wright, Jonathan. Doris Salcedo. Contemporary Magazine 35
(January 2002): 85.
2003
Bader, Joerg. 8th Istanbul Biennial. Kunstforum International
167 (NovemberDecember 2003): 4857.
Benjumea Uribe, Fernando. Doris Salcedo: El arte y la
guerra. Revista de Extension Cultural, Universidad Nacional
de Colombia 48 (December 2003): 1129.
Bruno, Giuliana. Havana: Memoirs of Material Culture.
Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (December 2003): 30324.
Calow, Jane. From Birmingham to Bogot: Tracing the
Metaphor of Submerged Space Through the Architecture
of 1960s Birmingham and the Artistic Practice of Doris
Salcedo. In Recoveries and Reclamations: Advances in Art and
Urban Futures, Volume 2, edited by Judith Rugg and Daniel
Hinchcliffe, 11927. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2003.
Cameron, Dan. 8th International Istanbul Biennial: Poetic Justice.
Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2003.
Exh. cat.
de Ory, Jose Antonio. CallejeroCarta de Bogot: Doris
Salcedo en el Palacio de Justicia. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 633 (March 2003): 107.
Fernndez, Mara. A Critical Perspective. NKA: Journal of
Contemporary African Art 18, no. 1 (SpringSummer 2003):
4855.
Garzon, Diego. Compromiso con la memoria. Semana
(Bogota) September 1, 2003, 14950.
Genocchio, Benjamin. Letter from Istanbul. Art Monthly
Australia 165 (November 2003): 34.
Heartney, Eleanor. Mending the Breach. Art in America 91,
no. 12 (December 2003): 7479, 118.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the
Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press,2003.
Lafuente, Pablo. 8th International Istanbul Biennial. Art
Monthly 271 (November 2003): 2627.
Merewether, Charles. Unland: Interview with Doris
Salcedo. In Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Dr. Paul J. Wood,
1,18083. New York: Wiley, 2003.
Pasini, Francesco, and Verzotti Giorgio. Il cacconto del filo:
Ricamo e cucito nellarte contemporaneo. Milan: Skira, 2003.
Exh. cat.
Salcedo, Doris. Traces of Memory: Art and Remembrance in
Colombia. Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America 2, no. 3
(Spring 2003): 2830.
Smith, Roberta. When Exhibitions Have More to Say Than
to Show. New York Times, April 13, 2003, AR31.
2004
Adams, Beverly, Diane and Bruce Halle, and Laurie J. Rufe.
Contemporary Art and Latin America: Selections from the Diane
and Bruce Halle Collection. Tucson, AZ: Tucson Museum of
Art, 2004. Exh. cat.
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Barson, Tanya. Unland the Place of Testimony: Doris Salcedos

Unland: audible in the mouth, 1998. London: Patrons of
New Art, Tate, 2004.
Cork, Richard. Down to the Wire. Times (London), September 11, 2004, 1819.
Falconer, Morgan. Contemporary Sculpture. Burlington
Magazine 146, no. 1221 (December 2004): 83738.
Mack, Joshua. Violent Ends. Modern Painters 17, no. 4
(December 2004January 2005): 5456.
Marx, Gary. Sculptor molds Colombias Pain into Art. Chicago Tribune, June 27, 2004, 3.
Mengham, Rod, and Carlos Basualdo. Doris Salcedo: Neither.
London: Jay Jopling/White Cube, 2004. Exh. cat.
Prez Len, Dermis. VIII Istanbul Biennial: Poetic Justice
for an Ideal Globalized World. ArtNexus 51 (December
2003February 2004): 11014.
Roca, Jos. Ana Mendietas Nile Born, Jos Leonilsons 34
with Scars, and Doris Salcedos Untitled. In Latin American
and Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo, edited by Miriam
Basilio, 14854. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004.
Exh. cat.
Stretch, Bonnie Barrett. MoMA at El Museo. ARTnews 103,
no. 6 (June 2004): 110.
Tawadros, Gilane, ed. Changing States: Contemporary Art and
Ideas in an Era of Globalisation. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2004.
Tiscornia, Ana. El MoMA at El Museo del Barrio. ArtNexus
53 (JulySeptember 2004): 9295.
2005
Ackermann, Franz, Adriano Pedrosa, and Julie Dunn. Farsites:
Urban Crisis and Domestic Symptoms in Recent Contemporary
Art. San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2005. Exh. cat.
Birbragher, Francine. Latin American Inclusions in the
MoMA Collection: An Interview with Luis Prez Oramas.
ArtNexus 58 (SeptemberNovember 2005): 7783.
Bentez Dueas, Issa Ma. ArtBasel 36. ArtNexus 58 (2005):
12022.
Bal, Mieke. The Commitment to Look. Journal of Visual
Culture 4 (2005): 14562.
Basualdo, Carlos, and Doris Salcedo. In conversation. In
Pressplay: Contemporary Artists in Conversation, 52741.
London: Phaidon, 2005.
Bernal, Maria Clara. Contradicciones y convivencias: Arte
de Amrica Latina, 19812000. ArtNexus 57 (JulyAugust
2005): 16062.
Bonami, Francesco, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. The
Pantagruel Syndrome: T1 Turin Triennial. Milan: Skira, 2005.
Exh. cat.
Comisso, Francesca. Una grossa grassa Triennale. Giornale
dellArte 23, no. 248 (November 2005): 23, 26.
Falletti, Vittorio. Torino Triennale tre musei: Giro del mondo
in citt. Arte 387 (November 2005): 11219.
Herbert, Martin. Beuys and After: The Beuys Continuum.
Modern Painters (February 2005): 6162, 6467.
Herzog, Hans-Michael, Fernn Gonzlez, Plinio Apuleyo

Mendoza, Alfredo Molano, and William Ospina. Cantos Cuentos Colombianos: Arte Colombiano contemporaneo.
Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005. Exh. cat.
Herzog, Hans-Michael, Sebastin Lpez, and Eugenio Valds
Figueroa. The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin
America. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005.
Lamoureux, Johanne. From Form to Platform: The Politics
of Representation and the Representation of Politics. Art
Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 6473.
Pini, Ivonne. Doris Salcedo. ArtNexus 56 (AprilJune 2005):
14445.
Roberts, Angela. Gargantuan. Art Review 58 (November
2005): 4849.
Salgado, Gabriela. Cantos/Cuentos ColombianosAn
Exhibition of Colombian Art from the Collection of
Daros-Latinamerica. ArtNexus 57 (JuneAugust 2005):
6469.
Schwarze, Dirk. Meilensteine: 50 Jahre Documenta. Berlin:
Bostelmann & Siebenhaar, 2005.
Tumlir, Jan. inSite_05: Various Venues, San Diego and
Tijuana. Artforum 44, no. 3 (November 2005): 24849,289.
2006
Diehl, Ute. Vllerei oder Fasten. ART: das Kunstmagazin
(January 2006): 9697.
Lequeux, Emmanuelle. T1, Triennale de Turin: un appetit
dogre pour lart contemporain. Beaux Arts Magazine 260
(February 2006): 126.
Margaroni, Maria, and Effie Yiannopoulou. Metaphoricity and
the Politics of Mobility. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Ratner, Megan. Turin Triennial. Frieze 98 (April 2006):
15960.
Salgado, Gabriela. On Hours and Maps: Two Exhibitions of
Latin American Art in England and Ireland. ArtNexus 5,
no. 60 (March 2006): 98100.
Waschek, Matthias, and Camran Mani. Portrait/Homage/
Embodiment. St. Louis: Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts,
2006. Exh. broch.
2007
Abrams, Joshua, and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. Politics and
the Classics. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 29, no. 1
(January 2007): 88100.
Adams, Beverly, Juan Ledezma, Mari Carmen Ramirez, Suely
Rolnik, Gilbert Vicario, and Sonia Salzstein. Constructing
a Poetic Universe: The Diane and Bruce Halle Collection of
Latin American Art. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2007.
Exh.cat.
Bal, Mieke, Achim Borchardt-Hume, Paul Gilroy, Eyal
Weizman, and Doris Salcedo. Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth.
London: Tate Publishing, 2007. Exh. cat.
Bran, Xos M. Buxn. Sexualidade, vida, arte e viceversa.
Grial 45, no. 176 (Winter 2007): 13037.
de Corral, Mara, and John R. Lane, eds. Fast Forward:
Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art. Dallas:
Dallas Museum of Art, 2007. Exh. cat.
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225
Doyle, Jennifer, Gilane Tawadros, and NGon Fall. Feminism: Three Views. Frieze 105 (March 2007): 17479.
Falconer, Morgan. Mind the Gap. ARTnews 106, no. 11
(December 2007): 44.
Gibbons, Joan. Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: IB Tauris, 2007.
Grynsztejn, Madeleine. Voice of the Invisible. Tate Etc. 11
(Autumn 2007): 4649.
Guardiola-Rivera, Oscar. The Image-Space. Naked Punch 9
(SummerFall 2007): 5865.
Hedges, Ruth. Doris Salcedo. Blueprint 260 (November
2007): 34.
Herbert, Martin. The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth.
London: Tate Publishing, 2007. Exh. broch.
Jasper, Adam. Counting the Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America. Art and Australia 45, no. 2 (December
2007): 20001.
Jury, Louise. Artist Takes a Crack at Tate Modern. Evening
Standard (London), October 8, 2007, A9.
Lyall, Sarah. Caution: Art Afoot. New York Times, December11, 2007, E1.
Mack, Joshua. Doris Salcedo: Freedom Fighting. Art Review
15 (October 2007): 5863.
Mead, Andrew. The Message Behind Salcedos Shibboleth
Is Frustratingly Elusive. Exhibit 226, no. 15 (October 25,
2007): 57.
Mengham, Rod. Doris Salcedo. London: Jay Jopling/White
Cube, 2007. Exh. cat.
Nicolin, Paola. Attenzione! Guarda dove metti i piedi.
Abitare 478 (2007): 5053.
Seleanu, Andr. Art et violence, lments dun dbat. Vie des
Arts 207 (Summer 2007): 2529.
Sullivan, Edward. The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Wong, Edlie L. Haunting Absences: Witnessing Loss in
Doris Salcedos Atrabilarios and Beyond. In The Image and
The Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture, edited by
Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, 17388. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.
Wu, Chin-Tao. Worlds Apart: Problems of Interpreting
Globalised Art. Third Text 21, no. 6 (November 2007):
71931.
2008
Birkhofer, Denise. Trace Memories: Clothing as Metaphor in
the Work of Doris Salcedo. Anamesa 6, no. 1 (Spring 2008):
4967.
Capdevila, Pol. Doris Salcedo. Lapiz 27, no. 239 (January
2008): 84.
Carey-Kent, Paul. Destroying the Gallery. Art World 6
(AugustSeptember 2008): 4849.
Carrozzini, Stefania. Shibboleth. DArs 48, no. 193 (March
2008): 1417.
Charlesworth, JJ. Shaping Politics. Art Review 18 (January
2008): 7073.
De Wild, Femke. Mind the Gap. Frame 61 (MarchApril
2008): 53.
Gayford, Martin. Rooms Divided. Apollo 167, no. 550

(2008): 6869.
Guglielmino, Giorgio. Aiuto, mi si spaccato il museo.
Giornale dellArte 26, no. 274 (2008): 36.
Haase, Amine. ber alle Abgrnde hinweg. Kunstforum
International 189 (JanuaryFebruary 2008): 38890.
Holgun, Beatriz Acevedo. Shibboleth y otras historias de
violencia. Nmero 56 (OctoberDecember 2008): 7679.
Jimnez, Carlos Moreno. Exclusiones/Censorship. Madrid:
Galera Moiss Prez de Albaniz, 2008. Exh. cat.
Malagn-Kurka, Mara Margarita. Doris Salcedo: Non-
Resolution Possibility. arte al dia 123 (JuneJuly 2008):
2429.
. Dos lenguajes contrastantes en el arte colombiano:
nueva figuracin e indexicalidad, en el contexto de la
problemtica sociopoltica de las dcadas de 1960 y 1980.
Revista de Estudios Sociales 31 (December 2008): 1633.
Mitchell, Charles Dee. Faith-based Initiatives. Art in America96, no. 10 (November 2008): 13641.
Pini, Ivonne. Doris Salcedo: Schibboleth. ArtNexus 68
(MarchMay 2008): 6063.
Searle, Adam. Doris Salcedo. Guardian (London), September 15, 2004, 28.
Sirmans, Franklin, Jen Budney, Arthur C. Danto, Julia P.
Herzberg, Greg Tate, Robert Farris Thompson, and Quincy
Troupe. NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith. Houston:
Menil Collection, 2008. Exh. cat.
2009
Amor, Monica. Doris Salcedo. Artforum 47, no. 6 (March
2009): 191.
. Doris Salcedo: Alexander and Bonin. Exhibit 47,
no.6 (February 2009): 191.
Escobar, Sol Astrid Giraldo. Doris Salcedo: Las memorias
y las cosas. Revista Universidad de Antioquia 297 (July
September 2009): 12227.
Kirking, Clayton. Doris Salcedo. ArtNexus 8, no. 73 (June
August 2009): 111.
McCallum, Pamela. Thinking through Postcoloniality. Ariel
40, no. 1 (January 2009): 15.
Mullin, Diane. On Location: Inalienable Rights: Speaking
of Home in Minneapolis. Public Art Review 20, no. 2
(Summer 2009): 8485.
Schwartzman, Allan, Jochen Volz, and Rodrigo Moura.
Through: Inhotim. Brumadinho, Brazil: Instituto Inhotim,
2009.
Stone, Anne. Bearing Partial Witness: Representations of
Missing Women. Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural
Studies 31, no. 23 (2009): 22136.
Valencia, Luis Fernando. Que es la experiencia estetica?: Hechos
artisticos e ideas esteticas en la obra de cuatro artistas Colombianos. Medellin, Colombia: La Carreta Editores, 2009.
12/12/14 1:25 PM
226
2010
Adan, Elizabeth. An Imperative to Interrupt: Radical Aesthetics, Global Contexts and Site-Specificity in the Recent
Work of Doris Salcedo. Third Text 24, no. 5 (September
2010): 58396.
Adler, Phoebe, Tom Howells, and Nikolaos Kotsopoulos.
Contemporary Art in Latin America. London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2010.
Bal, Mieke. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedos Political
Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Escobar, Sol Astrid Giraldo. Cuerpo de mujer: Modelo para
armar. Medelln, Colombia: La Carreta, Alcalda de
Medelln, 2010.
Harris, Gareth. Arrivederci nellutero. Giornale dellArte 28,
no. 299 (June 2010): 36.
Lubiak, Jarosaw, Jacques Derrida, and Monica Bonvicini.
Hospitality: Receiving Strangers. Lodz, Poland: Muzeum
Sztuki, 2010. Exh. cat.
Lequeux, Emmanuelle, and Bernardo Paz. Fondation
Inhotim: 100 hectares de paradis. Beaux-Arts Magazine
no.318 (2010): 10407.
Malagon-Kurka, Maria Margarita. Arte como presencia indexica:
La obra de tres artistas Colombianos en tiempos de violencia:
Beatriz Gonzalez, Oscar Munoz y Doris Salcedo en la decada de
los noventa. Bogota: Universidad de Los Andes, Facultad de
Artes y Humanidades, 2010.
Moreno, Laura Garcia. Troubled Materiality: The Installations of Doris Salcedo. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 43, no. 2 (June 2010): 95111.
Rugg, Judith. Exploring Site-Specific Art: Issues of Space and
Internationalism. London: IB Tauris, 2010.
Rugoff, Ralph. The New Dcor. London: Hayward Gallery,
2010. Exh. cat.
Supelano-Gross, Claudia. El contrapeso de la barbarie.
Benjamin en Colombia. Constelaciones: Revista de Teora
Crtica 2 (2012): 31841.
2011
Acevedo, Beatriz. Memories of Violencia in the Work of the
Colombian Artist Doris Salcedo: A Subjective View. Journal of Arts and Communities 2, no. 2 (July 2011): 15370.
Arajo, Judit Uzctegui. El imaginario de la casa en cinco artistas
contemporaneas: Remedios Varo, Louise Bourgeois, Marjetica
Potrc, Doris Salcedo y Sydia Reyes. Madrid: Eutelequia Editorial, 2011.
Cole, Lori. At the Site of State Violence: Doris Salcedos and
Julieta Hanonos Memorial Aesthetics. Arizona Journal of
Hispanic Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2011): 8794.
Corvaln, Kekena. Artistas Latinoamericanas: Un recorrido de
dilogos conceptuales. Havana: Artecubano Ediciones, 2011.
Dahlberg, Isabell. Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda. Flash
Art44, no. 279 (JulySeptember 2011): 103.
Ehrmantraut, Paola, and Dianna Niebylski. Violence and
the Latin American Imaginary: Preliminary Reflections.
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2011):
7986.
Gaitn, Juan A., Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Monika Szewczyk,

eds. Cornerstones. Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for
Contemporary Art, 2011.
Goltz, Sophie. Doris Salcedo: Plegaria muda. Springerin 17,
no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 68.
Giraldo, Andrs Santacoloma. Shibboleth de Doris Salcedo:
Reflexes sobre a representao do negativo. Revista Brasileira De Psicanlise 45, no. 1 (2011): 8994.
Lauzon, Claudette. Reluctant Nomads: Biennial Culture
and Its Discontents. RACAR: Canadian Art Review 36, no. 2
(2011): 1530.
Manninen, Saini. The Art of Leftovers: Memory, Matter and
Decay. Journal of Media Practice 12, no. 3 (2011): 24555.
Martnez, Francisco A. Ortega, ed. Trauma, cultura e historia:
Reflexiones interdisciplinarias para el nuevo milenio. Bogota:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Centro de Estudios
Sociales, 2011.
Sez de Ibarra, Mara Beln. Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda.
ArtNexus 10, no. 81 (MayJune 2011): 6667.
Salcedo, Doris, Magnus Jensner, Isabel Carlos, Mieke Bal,
Moacir dos Anjos. Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda. Munich:
Prestel Publishing, 2011. Exh. cat.
Salcedo, Doris. Art: 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century: Compassion. Directed by Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling. 2009.
New York: Art21 Inc., 2011. DVD.
Uribe, Guillermo Gonzalez. Doris Salcedo: Tras la memoria
de los vencidos. Numero 68 (MarchMay 2011): 2225.
Wu, Chin-Tao. Scars and Faultlines: The Art of Doris
Salcedo. New Left Review 69 (June 2011): 6177.
2012
Allard, Dominique. From Objects to Animated Things.
Esse 75 (MarchJune 2012): 411.
Alzate, Oscar Roldn. Inhotim: The Creation of a Contemporary Myth. ArtNexus 11, no. 86 (SeptemberNovember
2012): 5054.
Esposito, Domenico. Doris Salcedo, Plegaria Muda. DArs
52, no. 211 (September 2012): 4850.
Galindo, Dolores. Doris Salcedo: White Cube Masons Yard,
London. arte al da 140 (Fall 2012): 109.
Grnstad, Asbjrn, and Henrik Gustafsson. Ethics and Images
ofPain. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Jacobsen, Heidi Zuckerman. The Residue of Memory. Aspen:
Aspen Art Museum/Aspen Art Press, 2012. Exh. cat.
Kamps, Toby, Steve Seid, and Jenni Sorkin. Silence. Houston:
Menil Collection, 2012. Exh. cat.
Kelly, Michael. A Hunger for Aesthetics. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012.
Luke, Ben. Quiet Beauty in a Bleak and Bloody Basement.
Evening Standard (London), May 30, 2012, 45.
Masoero, Ada. Los Angeles della morte. Giornale dellArte 30,
no. 318 (March 2012): 42.
Muoz, Rubn Daro Yepes. La poltica del arte: Cuatro casos de
arte contemporneo en Colombia. Bogota: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2012.
Nataf, Natacha. Doris Salcedo, que vive lherbe colombienne.Beaux Arts Magazine 335 (May 2012): 148.
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227
Roca, Jos, and Sylvia Surez. Transpoltico: Arte en Colombia,

19922012. Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 2012.
2013
Adams, Beverly, and Vanessa Davidson, eds. Order, Chaos,
and the Space Between: Contemporary Latin American Art from
the Diane and Bruce Halle Collection. Phoenix: Phoenix Art
Museum, 2013. Exh. cat.
Alzate, Gastn. Absence and Pain in the Work of Doris
Salcedo and Rosemberg Sandoval. South Central Review 30,
no.3 (Fall 2013): 520.
Bianchi, Paolo. Cantos Cuentos Colombianos. Kunstforum
International 223 (OctoberDecember 2013): 36769.
Grovier, Kelly. 100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age. New
York: Thames and Hudson, 2013.
Herzog, Hans-Michael. Cantos Cuentos Colombianos: Arte
contempornea Colombiana. Rio de Janiero: Cobogo, 2013.
Exh.cat.
Morley, Simon. The Sublime. London: Whitechapel Gallery,
2013.
Moszynska, Anna. Sculpture Now. New York: Thames and
Hudson, 2013.
Tansini, Laura. Life Might Prevail: Doris Salcedos Plegaria
Muda. Sculpture 32, no. 5 (June 2013): 4449.
Wilson, Michael. How to Read Contemporary Art: Experiencing
Art of the 21st Century. New York: Abrams, 2013.
2014
Crow, Kelly. Colombias Art Scene Heats Up. Wall Street
Journal (New York), June 26, 2014.
Lubow, Arthur. Speak, Memory. W Magazine (December
2014/January 2015): 8892.
Mateer, John. Wars Unquiet Eyes. Art and Australia 51,
no.3 (Autumn 2014): 396403.
Suhama, Motoko, and Hiromi Kojima, eds. The 9th Hiroshima
Art Prize: Doris Salcedo. Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Museum
of Contemporary Art, 2014.
Triana, Camilo Chico. Doris Salcedo: Flora. arte al da 145
(FebruaryApril 2014): 12021.
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228
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Untitled, 1986
Steel shelving, steel cot, plastic dolls,
rubber, wax, and animal fiber
73 9478 1818 in. (187 241 46 cm)
Tate: Purchased 2002
pp. 20, 4245
Untitled, 1987
Steel apparatus, wooden chest, plastic,
and dust
Three parts: 301516 45 3738 in. (76
115 95 cm); 301516 2278 1878 in.
(76 58 48 cm); and 29 3658
22716 in. (75 93 57 cm)
Collection of the artist
p. 20
Untitled, 1989
Steel crib, steel mesh, fabric, and wax
38 31 18 in. (96 79 45 cm)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Contemporary Curators Fund
pp. 5657
Untitled, 1989
Wooden chair with upholstery, concrete,
and steel
38 16 17 in. (97.8 42.5
45cm)
Collection of Barbara F. Lee, Cambridge,
Massachusetts
pp. 6061
Untitled, 1989
Wooden nightstand, concrete, and steel
20 14 19 in. (50.8 35.6 48.9 cm)
Collection of Carolyn Alexander
Untitled, 198990
Steel bed frames, plaster, cotton shirts,
and animal fiber
Two parts, each: 7178 35 5 in.
(182.6 89.5 14 cm)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
purchase through a gift of Shawn and
Brook Byers
pp. 4649
Untitled, 198990/2013
Steel bed frames, plaster, cotton shirts,
and animal fiber
Four parts, each: 5 35 7178 in.
(14 89.5 182.6 cm)
pp. 4647
Untitled, 198990/2013
Five parts, overall: 70316 901516 1038 in.
(178.3 231 26.3 cm)
Private collection
pp. 4647, 5053
Untitled, 198990/2013
Three parts, overall: 68916 4458
1038in. (174.2 113.4 26.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist; Alexander and
Bonin, New York; and White Cube
pp. 4647, 5253
Untitled, 198990/2013
6538 1338 1038 in. (166.1 34
26.3cm)
pp. 4647, 5253
Untitled, 198990/2013
6918 1338 1038 in. (175.6 34
26.3cm)
pp. 4647, 5253
Untitled, 198990/2013
6458 1338 1038 in. (164.1 33.97
26.3 cm)
Flvia and Guilherme Teixeira
Collection
pp. 4647, 5253
Untitled, 1990
Wooden table, steel table, and concrete
28 21 18 in. (72.5 55 45.5 cm)
p. 5859
Untitled, 1991
and steel
39 17 17 in. (99.1 43.2 43.2 cm)
Tiago Ltd: The Tiqui Atencio Collection
Untitled, 1992
Wooden dresser, concrete, and steel
35 54 21 in. (88.9 138.4 53.3 cm)
Private collection
Untitled, 1992
Wooden armoire with glass, wooden
chairs with upholstery, concrete, and
steel
45 73 20 in. (114.3 186.7
50.8cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of
Society for Contemporary Art
pp. 6263
Atrabiliarios, 19922004
Shoes, drywall, paint, wood, animal fiber,
and surgical thread
43 niches and 40 boxes; overall dimensions variable
Accessions Committee Fund purchase:
gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein,
Patricia and Raoul Kennedy, Elaine
McKeon, Lisa and John Miller, Chara
Schreyer and Gordon Freund, and
Robin Wright
pp. 28, 10209
La Casa Viuda II, 199394
Wooden door, wooden cabinet, wood,
steel, clothing, and bone
Four parts, overall: 102 3138 23 in.
(259.7 79.7 60.3 cm)
Collection Art Gallery of Ontario,
Toronto, gift from the Volunteer
Committee Fund, 1997
pp. 21, 11215
La Casa Viuda III, 1994
Wooden doors, wooden bed frame, and
clothing
Two parts: 101 34 238 in. (258.5
86.4 6 cm) and 32 34 2 in.
(83.2 86.4 5.1 cm)
Private collection
pp. 11617
La Casa Viuda IV, 1994
Wooden door, wooden bed frame,
clothing, and bone
102516 18 13 in. (259.9 47 33 cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
Committee on Painting and Sculpture
Funds, Latin American and Caribbean
Fund, and gift of Patricia Phelps de
Cisneros
pp. 11819
12/12/14 1:25 PM
229
La Casa Viuda VI, 1995

Wooden doors, steel chair, and bone
Three parts: 7478 39 18 in. (190.2
99.1 47 cm); 6278 47 22 in.
(159.7 119.3 55.8 cm); and 62
38 18 in.(158.7 96.5 46.9 cm)
Collection of the Israel Museum,
Jerusalem, gift of Shawn and Peter
Leibowitz, New York, to American
Friends of the Israel Museum
pp. 12021
Untitled, 1995
and steel
3858 14 1938 in. (98 37.5 49.2 cm)
Cejas Art Ltd: Paul and Trudy Cejas
Untitled, 1995
Wooden armoire, wooden bed frame,
concrete, steel, and clothing
7718 7478 4958 in. (195.8 189.9
125.8 cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC, Joseph H. Hirshhorn
Purchase Fund, 1995
pp. 6673
Unland: irreversible witness, 199598
Wooden tables, steel crib, silk, human
hair, and thread
44 98 35 in. (111.8 248.9 88.9 cm)
purchase through the Jacques and
Natasha Gelman Fund and the Accessions Committee Fund
pp. 12223, 12831
Unland: the orphans tunic, 1997
Wooden tables, silk, human hair, and
thread
31 96 38 in. (80 245 98 cm)
la Caixa Contemporary Art Collection
pp. 12227
Unland: audible in the mouth, 1998
Wooden tables, silk, human hair, and
thread
31 124 29 in. (80 315 75 cm)
Tate: Presented by the Patrons of New
Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation 1999
pp. 12223, 13235
Untitled, 1998
Wooden armoires, wooden table,
concrete, and steel
71 49 25 in. (181 124.5 63.5 cm)
Collection of Leo Katz
pp. 7879, 8687
Untitled, 2000
32116 1618 1618 in. (81.5 41 41 cm)
Planta, Fundacin Sorigu, Spain
p. 82 (right)
Untitled, 1998
Wooden armoire, wooden cabinets,
concrete, and steel
82 47 39 in. (210 129.5
100cm)
Planta, Fundacin Sorigu, Spain
pp. 7879
Untitled, 2001
Wooden armoire, wooden cabinet,
concrete, and steel
79 39 81 in. (201 100.5 206 cm)
essel
Marieluise Hessel Collection, H
Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College,
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Untitled, 1998
Wooden dressers, concrete, and steel
59 45 22 in. (151.5 115.6
57cm)
Private collection
pp. 8081
Untitled, 2001
Wooden armoire, wooden cabinet with
glass, concrete, steel, and clothing
80 67 50 in. (203.5 170 127 cm)
The Rachofsky Collection
pp. 9697
Untitled, 1998
Wooden cabinet with glass, concrete,
steel, and clothing
72 39 13 in. (183.5 99.5 33 cm)
Collection of Lisa and John Miller,
fractional and promised gift to the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art
pp. 7677
Thou-less, 200102
Stainless steel
Nine parts: 2 parts: 421116 301116
30516in. (108.5 78 77 cm), 43516
36 221316 in. (110 92 58 cm);
2parts: 43516 2638 20316 in. (110
67 51 cm), 43516 27316 191116 in.
(110 69 50 cm); 2 parts: 43516
27916 18 in. (110 70 47 cm),
43516 2538 17 in. (110 64
45cm); 1 part: 43516 271516 191116in.
(110 71 50 cm); 2 parts: 421516
14916 1438 in. (109 37 36.5 cm),
43516 17516 1538 in. (110 44
39cm); overall dimensions variable
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel,
Neue Galerie, State and Municipal Art
Collections
pp. 14246
Untitled, 1998
Wooden armoire, wooden chair, concrete,
and steel
84 5878 22 in. (214 149.5
57cm)
Tate: Presented by the American Fund
for the Tate Gallery 1999
p. 78
Untitled, 1998
concrete, and steel
49 82 34 in. (124.5 208.3
88.3cm)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,
Purchased 1999
pp. 78, 9091
Untitled, 1998
37 17 21 in. (96 44 53.5 cm)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
Museum purchase, Robert and
Daphne Bransten New Art Purchase
Fund
Untitled, 200405
Stainless steel
42 15 16 in. (107 41 38 cm)
Untitled, 200405
Stainless steel
42 48 27 in. (107 122 70 cm)
Collection of Marilyn and Larry Fields
p. 147
12/12/14 1:25 PM
230
Untitled, 2007
Wooden armoire, wooden chair, concrete,
and steel
39 78 19 in. (100.5 200
48.5cm)
Private collection
pp. 8485
Disremembered III, 2014

3378 18 518 in. (86 47 13 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Alexander and
Bonin, New York
Untitled, 2008
concrete, and steel
8658 95 40 in. (220 242 102 cm)
Collection Museum of Contemporary
Art Chicago, gift of Katharine S.
Schamberg by exchange, 2008.20
pp. 9293
Untitled, 2008
Wooden armoires, concrete, and steel
89 57 23 in. (228 145 59 cm)
Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus
p. 8889
Untitled, 2008
3938 16 18 in. (100 42 47 cm)
Collection of Clarissa Alcock Bronfman
Seventy-eight of one hundred and
sixty-six parts, each: 6458 84
24in. (164 214 61 cm); overall
dimensions variable
Inhotim Collection, Brazil
pp. 18491, 214
A Flor de Piel, 2014
445 252 in. (1130 640 cm)
Courtesy of the artist
pp. 19293, book jacket
Disremembered I, 2014
35 21 6 in. (89 55 16 cm)
Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle
pp. 19899, endsheets
Disremembered II, 2014
35116 2158 6516 in. (89 55 16 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube
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231
CONTRIBUTORS
Elizabeth Adan is an Associate Professor in the Department

of Art and Design at California Polytechnic State University
(Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo, where she teaches classes on
modern and contemporary art history and is affiliated faculty
and a member of the Advisory Board in the Department of
Womens and Gender Studies. Her research brings together
postwar, postmodern, and contemporary art and its histories;
feminist, critical race, and queer theories; and the status and
practice of representation in political, aesthetic, and cultural
terms. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, she has also
worked as a practicing artist, a freelance arts administrator,
and a curator.
Steven L. Bridges is Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of
Contemporary Art. Most recently he curated a solo exhibition
of the work of Chicago-based artist Jason Lazarus at the MCA,
which traveled to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San
Francisco. In addition, he assisted in the organizing of such
exhibitions at the MCA as Paul Sietsema (2013), Amalia Pica
(2013), Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks (2012), and MCA
DNA: William Kentridge (2012). Bridges is also cocurator of the
annual Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival
in Chicago and in 2012 cocurated the MFA thesis exhibition
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His writings
have been published in numerous journals, including Art and
the Public Sphere, the Live Arts Almanac, Dispatch, and Art and
Education Papers.
Katherine Brinson is Curator, Contemporary Art at the
SolomonR. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she
recentlycurated a major retrospective of the work of American artist Christopher Wool (201314), which traveled to the
Art Institute of Chicago. Since joining the Guggenheim in
2005, Brinson has organized exhibitions at the SolomonR.
Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the
Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, including solo presentations
by Danh Vo (2013), Hans-Peter Feldmann (2011), Agathe
Snow (2011), Ryan Gander (2010), and Julieta Aranda (2009).
In 2011 she cocurated The Luminous Interval: The D.Daskalopoulos Collection, and she has organized the past three iterations of the Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial award for significant
achievement in contemporary art.
Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis 19871993. From 2002 to

2007 she was the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner
Center for the Arts, where she organized the first US retrospectives of Louise Lawler and Luc Tuymans, as well as Part
Object Part Sculpture, which examined the influence of Marcel
Duchamps erotic objects. While Curator of Contemporary Art
at the Baltimore Museum of Art from 200002, she arranged
Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post1960s art. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays, and
her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art
Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard
Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence,
she is currently working on an exhibition about Black Mountain College.
Julie Rodrigues Widholm is Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2013, she coorganized A
rgentinean
artist Amalia Picas first American museum s urvey with MIT
List Visual Arts Center. In 2012, she curated the first major
solo museum survey of the work of Rashid Johnson, Rashid
Johnson: Message to Our Folks (2012), which traveled to the
Miami Art Museum (2012), the High Museum of Art, Atlanta
(2013), and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
(2013). Since joining the MCA in 1999, she has curated international group exhibitions such as Escultura Social: A New
Generation of Art from Mexico City (2007), in-depth presentations
of the MCA Collection that include Unbound: Contemporary
Art After Frida Kahlo, Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt
Companion, and MCA Exposed: Defining Moments in Photography
19672007, and has assisted with major international touring
exhibitions such as Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture
(2005) and The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 19451994 (2001), as well as retrospectives of
work by Luc Tuymans and Richard Tuttle, among others. She
has also organized solo exhibitions at the MCA featuring the
work of more than thirty Chicago-basedartists.
Helen Molesworth is the Chief Curator at the Museum of

Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. From 201014 she
was the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston, where she assembled one-person
exhibitions of artists Steve Locke, Catherine Opie, Josiah
McElheny, and Amy Sillman, and group exhibitions such as
Dance/Draw and This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in
the 1980s. As head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum, she presented an
exhibition of photographs by Moyra Davey and ACT UP NY:
12/12/14 1:25 PM
232
EXHIBITION SPONSORS
Lead support for Doris Salcedo is provided by the Harris

Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris:
Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris, Toni and Ron Paul,
Pam and Joe Szokol, Linda and Bill Friend, and Stephanie
and John Harris. Additional lead support is provided by Stefan
Edlis and Gael Neeson, The Bluhm Family Foundation,
Anne Kaplan, Howard and Donna Stone, The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Helen and Sam Zell.
The artists galleries have also provided support to present

the exhibition and catalogue: White Cube and Alexander and
Bonin, New York.
Major support is provided by The Chicago Community Trust;

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia, Ministry of Culture
of Colombia, and Embassy of Colombia in Washington D.C.;
Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul; Paula and Jim Crown;
Nancy and Steve Crown; Walter and Karla Goldschmidt
Foundation; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Susana and Ricardo
Steinbruch; and Kristin and Stanley Stevens.
Embassy in the United States

Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Additional generous support is provided by the National

Endowment for the Arts, Marilyn and Larry Fields, the Diane
and Bruce Halle Foundation, Agnes Gund, the Kovler Family
Foundation, Nancy and David Frej, Mary E. Ittelson, Lilly
Scarpetta, Jennifer Aubrey, the Dedalus Foundation, Jacques
and Natasha Gelman Trust, Ashlee and Martin Modahl, Lois
and Steve Eisen and the Eisen Family Foundation, the North
Shore Affiliate of the MCA, Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein,
Jeanne and Michael Klein, Lisa and John Miller, Elizabeth
Firestone Graham Foundation, the Graham Foundation for
Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Emily Rauh Pulitzer,
Maria C. Bechily and Scott Hodes, the Barbara Lee Family
Foundation, Jill Garling and Tom Wilson, Solita Mishaan, and
Sara Szold.
12/12/14 1:25 PM
233
LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION
Carolyn Alexander, New York

Alexander and Bonin, New York
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
The Art Institute of Chicago
Tiqui Atencio, New York
Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, New York
Paul and Trudy Cejas, Miami
Marilyn and Larry Fields, Chicago
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Fundacin Sorigu, Lleida, Spain
Diane and Bruce Halle, Scottsdale, Arizona
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art,
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College,
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC
Inhotim Collection, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Leo Katz, Bogot
Jill and Peter Kraus, New York
la Caixa Contemporary Art Collection, Barcelona
Barbara Lee, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lisa and John Miller, Hillsborough, California
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Neue Galerie, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Germany
Private collections
Howard and Cindy Rachofsky, Dallas
Doris Salcedo, Bogot
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Tate
Flvia and Guilherme Teixeira, Nova Lima, Brazil
White Cube
12/12/14 1:25 PM
234
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

DS refers to Doris Salcedo.
absence
activating, 17, 33, 34, 38n29, 210, 216, 217
defined to include marginalization, 19, 26
as result of political violence, 2930, 38n29, 210, 215, 217
Abu Ghraib prison, 38n23
Abyss (2005), 14, 25, 36, 16869
details, 26, 167, 17071
Accin de Duelo (2007), 14, 23, 24, 25, 18083
Adorno, Theodor, 38n19
A Flor de Piel (2014), 13, 2223, 19293, 209, 21012
details, 23, 19495, 19697
genesis of, 216
title of, 213n8
Amery, Jean, 17
Amor, Monica, 35, 202
Anglican Cathedral, Liverpool, 35, 8081
appropriation artists, 203
Arratia, Euridice, 31
Arte Povera, 25
art history, contemporary, 29
Atrabiliarios (19922004), 22, 32, 34, 1027, 205, 211
details, 28, 109
funeral imagery in, 209
genesis of, 30
title of, 18
Bal, Mieke, 37n19, 206
Bennett, Jill, 30
Betancur, Belisario, 24
Beuys, Joseph, 17, 202, 211
burial and entombment, 22, 23, 33, 205, 210
Butler, Judith, 213
Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 35, 6669
Casa de Moneda, Bogot, 19
Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 14, 25, 26
Celan, Paul, 17, 22, 27n26
Centre dArt Contemporain du Creux de LEnfer, Thiers,
installation (1996), 7475
Chicago, Judy, 203
The Dinner Party, 207n18
Womanhouse, 203
Christianity, 27n26, 212
clothing. See under materials
coffins, 23, 32, 210
Colombia
FARC murder of parliament members (2007), 25
massacres, Urab (1988), 20, 30
mass graves, 23, 217
murder of young men for bounties (200309), 23, 210, 217

siege of the Palace of Justice (1985), 14, 24. See also desaparecidos, los
Colombian Supreme Court, 24
communication between art and viewer, 13, 204
contemporaneity, 29, 37n5
contributors, 231
death-in-life, 210. See also social death
Debord, Guy, 29
desaparecidos, los, 18, 2021, 30, 209, 212
defined, 27n6
disappeared. See desaparecidos
Disremembered I (2014), 26, 199
Disremembered series (2014), 14, 199, 213n7
drug cartels, 20
Duchamp, Marcel, 201, 2024
The Large Glass, 206
Mile of String, 201, 202
elegies, 20910, 212
fabric, social, 12, 211
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), 25
feminism, 203, 206
second wave, 31
feminist art of the 1970s, 203, 207n18
Fischli and Weiss, 203
forgetting and memory, 12, 17, 26, 210, 215
fragility, 13, 216
funeral imagery, 209, 210
furniture. See under materials
Galera Garcs Velsquez, Bogot, 20
Garcia Moreno, Laura, 31
Garzn, Jaime, 14, 23, 211
Gober, Robert, 201, 203
Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 31
Gordon, Avery, 22
Goya, Francisco
Second of May 1808, 24
Gran Fury, 27n23
graves, 23, 210, 213n12, 217
grief, 17, 18, 209, 213, 217
Guantnamo Bay, 25, 205
gun violence, 12, 25, 212
handwork. See labor, manual
Hatoum, Mona, 31
healing, 20, 22, 210
Hiroshima Art Prize for Peace, 15, 215
Holocaust, 17, 31, 38n19
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235
iconoclasm, 31, 37n14, 38n20, 38n28

icons, 3334, 37n14, 38n30, 21011, 212
idols and idolatry, 38n30
Inhotim, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 27n29, 205
Istanbul Biennial, 14, 24, 15759
Jameson, Fredric, 19
justice and injustice, 13, 19, 27n4, 209, 217
juxtapositions, 20, 39n33
Keats, John
epitaph, 212, 213n12
Kelly, Mary, Post-Partum Document, 203
Koons, Jeff, 203
Kubler, George, 207
labor, manual, 13, 19, 2012, 204, 211
labor, slave, 25
La Casa Viuda I (199294), 21, 30, 32, 110
detail, 111
La Casa Viuda II (199394), 21, 30, 32, 11213
details, 21, 114, 115
La Casa Viuda III (1994), 21, 116
detail, 117
La Casa Viuda IV (1994), 21, 118
detail, 119
La Casa Viuda series (199295), 13, 2021, 35, 11021
La Casa Viuda V (1994), 21
La Casa Viuda VI (1995), 21, 121
detail, 120
Laignelet, Victor, 23
Lanzmann, Claude, 38n20
Liverpool Biennial, 35, 7881
London, 201
Los Angeles, 23, 216
massacres, 210. See also under Colombia
materials
animal fiber, 32, 34
brick, 25
clothing, 20, 21, 22, 32, 33, 210
concrete, 21, 201, 203
doors, 2021
furniture, hospital, 13, 20
furniture, household, 12, 17, 30, 31, 201
hair, 31, 33
human bone, 21, 32
metal, 24
needles, 26, 213n7
roses, 23, 21011
Medelln, 20
memorialization, 202, 2045, 209, 211
memories, 22, 24, 31, 211, 215
memory and forgetting, 12, 17, 26, 210, 215
Merewether, Charles, 30
Milton, John
Lycidas, 209
Minh-ha, Trinh T., 22
Minimalism, 31
Mondzain, Marie-Jos, 31, 3334, 38n30, 216
mourning
collective, 12, 23, 25, 27n24
and empathy, 19, 26
experience of, 18, 30, 207, 212, 213, 215
gestures of, 18, 209, 210, 213n7
museums
idea of, 206
supposed neutrality of, 26, 2056
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 17, 25, 26, 38n2830, 39n32
Neither (2004), 14, 2425, 36, 160, 161, 2056
details, 163, 16465
title of, 206
neutrality of museums, 25, 2056
New York University, 19
nonrepresentational art, 26, 2930
Noviembre 6 (2001), 24, 14041
Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002), 14, 24, 15253
details, 154, 155
title of, 24
oppression, 3536, 39n39, 206
oration, funeral, 21516
organic elements, 13, 17, 209. See also materials
Palace of Justice, Bogot, 14, 24. See also Noviembre 6,
Noviembre 6 y 7
Palimpsest (2013present), 14, 15n2, 2526, 21213
detail, 208
Plath, Sylvia
Edge, 21011
Plaza de Bolvar, Bogot, 14, 25, 181
Plegaria Muda (200810), 18485, 19091, 205, 209, 210
details, 187, 18889, 214
genesis of, 23, 21617
title of, 23, 212
poetics, 12, 209, 215
postcolonialism, 2045
Postminimalism, 20, 31
presence
divine, 34, 38n29
imposing, 13, 18, 22, 3334, 202, 209
Ramazani, Jahan, 209
Rancire, Jacques, 27n12, 32, 33, 34, 39n35, 39n38
readymades
Duchampian, 201, 207
handmade, 20102, 204
representation, postwar crisis of, 31, 38n20
responsibility, 14, 206, 217
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 25
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236
Ruskin, John, 212

Salcedo, Doris. See also materials; techniques
and architecture, 24
career, 12, 18, 2930
color palette, 17, 210
creative process, 212
documentary film on, 14
exhibitions, 12, 1314, 20, 35
in her own words, 202, 211, 21517
installations, 13, 35, 36, 39n39
interventions, public, 14, 2324, 36, 201, 212
mourning, 213, 216
prizes received, 15, 20
research and development, 17, 27n4, 212, 21517
theme of delay, 204, 206, 212
themes of displacement and loss, 18, 22
untitled works, 13, 20, 31, 35
Saln Nacional de Artistas Colombianos, Medelln, 20
Scarry, Elaine, 211
Schapiro, Miriam, 203
Womanhouse, 203
second wave feminism, 31
Shibboleth (2007), 25, 172, 201, 2034, 206, 211
details, 173, 17579, 200
title of, 25, 203
and use of the site, 36
Shoah. See Holocaust
Shoah (film), 38n20
shrouds, 209, 210, 213n7, 216
Siege of the Palace of Justice (1985), 14, 24
silence, 23, 27n23, 206
SITE Santa Fe installation (199899), 12223
site-specificity, 39n39, 201
and DSs artwork, 14, 19, 23, 2425, 36
social death, 15n1, 23, 25, 217
Sontag, Susan, 209
space, architectural, 24, 36
space and time, inextricability of, 205, 206
spaces, public, 12, 14, 35, 39n35
sponsors, 232
Steinbach, Haim, 203
Surrealism, 201
Tate Modern, London, 14, 201
Taylor, Diana, 34
techniques
aging, 20
puncturing, 13, 2223, 25, 33, 38n27, 211
suturing, 13, 23, 32, 211
wrapping, 1920
Tenebrae Noviembre 7, 1985 (19992000), 24, 13637
detail, 13839
title of, 27n26
thing theory, 38n30
Thou-less (200102), 14445

details, 14243, 146
time, postcolonial, 2045
timelessness, 12, 17, 19, 204, 206
titles, 18. See also under specific artworks
Turbine Hall Commission, 25
Turin Triennial, 14, 25
United States
societal problems, 12, 212
Universidad de Bogot Jorge Tadeo Lozano, 19
Unland: audible in the mouth (1998), 35, 13233, 135
Unland: irreversible witness (199598), 12829
detail, 130
Unland series (199598), 31, 33, 35, 12235, 210
puncturing technique in, 13, 38n27
title of, 22
Unland: the orphans tunic (1997), 12425
details, 126, 127
Untitled (1986), 20, 4243
detail, 45
Untitled (1987), 13, 20
Untitled (198990), 48, 49
Untitled (1990), 58
Untitled (1992), 6263
Untitled (19992000), 14, 14851, 21112
Untitled (2000), 82 (right)
Untitled (2001), 97
Untitled (2003), 14, 24, 15759
Untitled (200405), 147
Untitled (2007), 8485
Untitled (1989), chair, 60
detail, 61
Untitled (1989), crib, 57
Untitled (198990/2013), hospital beds, 4647
Untitled (198990/2013), mens shirts, 13, 30, 32, 5253
details, 51, 55
Untitled (1995), armoire, 22, 71
detail, 72
Untitled (1995), chair, 82 (left)
detail, 83
Untitled (1995), dresser, 65
Untitled (1998), armoire, 33, 9091
Untitled (1998), armoires, 87
Untitled (1998), cabinet, 22, 77
detail, 76
Untitled (2008), armoires, 88
detail, 89
Untitled (2008), table and armoires, 9899
details, 100, 101
victims, 1719, 2426, 210, 212, 215
Villaveces-Izquierdo, Santiago, 30
violence, 32
gang, 23, 210, 21617
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237
political, 12, 29, 33, 34, 209, 215

Viso, Olga, 206
war
around the globe, 1819, 217
in Colombia, 18, 215, 217
White Cube, London, 27n29, 205
White Cube installation (2007), 9495
Whiteread, Rachel, 31, 201, 203
widows, 19, 21
Wong, Edlie, 30
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238
TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY

ART CHICAGO
Chair
King Harris
Vice Chairs
Stefan Edlis
Anne Kaplan
Sylvia Neil
Secretary
Rob Bellick
Treasurer
Michael OGrady
Trustees
Sara Albrecht
Michael Alper
Jennifer Aubrey
Gerhard Bette
Leslie Bluhm
Marlene Breslow-Blitstein
Marc Brooks
Michael Canmann
Carol Cohen
Nancy Crown
Robert H. Defares
Donald J. Edwards
Elissa Hamid Efroymson
Lois Eisen
Larry Fields
Brenda Fleissner
Jay Franke
Nicholas Giampietro
James A. Gordon
W. George Greig
Kenneth C. Griffin
Madeleine Grynsztejn**
Jack Guthman
William J. Hokin
William Hood
Cynthia Hunt
Gretchen Jordan
Don Kaul
Liz Lefkofsky
Ron Levin
Robert N. Mayer
Nancy A. Lauter McDougal
Marquis D. Miller
Kate Neisser
Martin Nesbitt
Michael J. OConnor
Carol Prins
Naomi Mori Reese
Eve Rogers
Cari Sacks
Marjorie Susman
Sara Szold
Kathy Taslitz
Dia S. Weil
Helen Zell*
Martin E. Zimmerman
Life Trustees
Marilynn B. Alsdorf
John D. Cartland*
Marshall Front
Helyn D. Goldenberg*
Doris Holleb
Mary Ittelson*
John C. Kern
Sally Meyers Kovler*
Lewis Manilow*
Mrs. Robert B. Mayer
Judith Neisser
Dorie Sternberg
Daryl Gerber Stokols
Donna A. Stone
Jerome H. Stone
Allen M. Turner*
Artist Trustee
David Hartt
Presidents of Support Groups
Kristin Stevens, Womens Board**
Ann Feinberg, Docents**
*Past Chair
**Ex-officio
As of December 2014
12/12/14 1:25 PM
This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Doris Salcedo,

organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, curated by
Madeleine Grynsztejn and Julie Rodrigues Widholm, and presented at
the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, February 21May 24, 2015,
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June 26October 7, 2015, and the
Prez Art Museum Miami, May 6October 23, 2016.
Produced by the Design, Publishing, and New Media Department of the
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, with the assistance of Manager
of Rights and Images Bonnie Rosenberg and former Rights and Images
Assistant Katie Levi.
200 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611
www.mcachicago.org
312.280.2660
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Photo Credits
All artworks by Doris Salcedo are reproduced courtesy of the artist;
Alexander and Bonin, New York; and White Cube.
Unless otherwise mentioned, all artworks Doris Salcedo.
Every reasonable attempt has been made to locate the owners of copyrights in the book and to ensure the credit information supplied is accurately listed. Errors or omissions will be corrected in future editions.
Indexed by Beth Chapple

Typeset in Caslon and Futura by Maggie Lee
Color management by iocolor, Seattle
p. 23: Ingrid Raymond P; pp. 26 (right), 16869: photo: Paolo Pellion;

pp.4243, 45: photo: Orcutt & Van Der Putten; pp. 5153, 153 (bottom right), 154: photo: Oscar Monsalve Pino; p. 57: Photograph 2014
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; pp. 58, 76, 77, 87, 9091, 12430: photo:
David Heald; pp. 60, 61, 89, 214: photo: Jason Mandella; pp. 6263:
photography The Art Institute of Chicago; p. 65: Digital Image
The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY;
pp.6669: photo: Richard Stoner; p. 71: photo: Lee Stalsworth; pp. 8081:
Reproduced courtesy of the Liverpool Biennial Archive at Liverpool John
Moores University. Photo: Nick Hunt; pp. 8485: photo: Todd-White
Art Photography; pp. 88, 9899, 10001, 15253, 155, 15758, 17273,
17579, 18283: photo: Sergio Clavijo; pp. 9394, 13641, 16061, 16365:
photo: Stephen White; pp. 11011: Worcester Art Museum (MA), Gift
of the Friends of Contemporary Art, 1994.241. Image Worcester Art
Museum; pp. 11213, 115: photo: Carlo Catenazzi; pp. 12021: photo:
D.James Dee; p. 12223: photo: Herbert Lotz; p. 13233: Tate,
London 2014; pp. 14445: MHK/Photo: Ute Brunzel; p. 150: Courtesy
of El Espectador, Bogot; p. 159: photo: Muammer Yanmaz; pp. 18081:
photo: Juan Fernando Castro; pp. 18485, 18791: photo: Patrizia Tocci;
pp. 19293: photo: Kazuhiro Uchida; pp. 19497: photo: Ben Westoby;
p. 200: photo: Marcus Leith/Andrew Dunkley; and p. 202: Succession
Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York 2014. Photo: John D. Schiff. The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art
Resource, NY.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Salcedo, Doris, 1958 artist.
[Works. Selections]
idholm and Madeleine
Doris Salcedo/[edited by] Julie Rodrigues W
Grynsztejn.
pages: illustrations; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-24458-7 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Salcedo, Doris, 1958Catalogs. 2.SculptureColombia
Exhibitions. 3. MinimalsculptureColombiaExhibitions. 4.Installations (Art)ColombiaExhibitions. 5. Salcedo, Doris, 1958
Criticism and interpretation. I.Widholm, Julie Rodrigues, editor.
adeleine, editor. III.Museum of Contemporary Art
II.Grynsztejn, M
(Chicago, Ill.), host institution. IV. Title.
NB379.S25A4 2015
730.92dc23
2014035717
Jacket: Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel (detail), 2014; rose petals and thread;
445 252 in. (1130 640 cm); installation view Hiroshima City Museum
of Contemporary Art, 2014. Photo: Kazuhiro Uchida
Endsheets: Doris Salcedo, Disremembered I (detail), 2014; sewing needles
and silk thread; 35 21 6 in. (89 55 16 cm)
p. 16: Doris Salcedo, Untitled (detail), 1995; wooden cabinet with glass,
concrete, steel, and clothing; 63 39316 14916 in. (162 99.5 37cm)
p. 28: Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios (detail), 19922004; shoes, drywall,
paint, wood, animal fiber, and surgical thread; 43 niches and 40boxes;
overall dimensions variable
p. 200: Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (detail), 2007; concrete and steel; length:
548 ft. (167 m); Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2007
p. 208: Doris Salcedo, Palimpsest (test fragment), 2014
p. 214: Doris Salcedo, Plegaria Muda (detail), 200810; wood, concrete,
earth, and grass; one hundred and sixty-six parts, each: 6458 84 24 in.
(164 214 61 cm); overall dimensions variable; installation view, Museo
Universitario Arte Contemporneo (MUAC), Mexico City, 2011
2015 by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, including photocopy, recording or any other information
storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher.
Printed in Verona, Italy, by Graphicom
In association with
The University of Chicago Press
1427 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
www.press.uchicago.edu
773.702.7700
Production by
Marquand Books, Inc., Seattle
www.marquand.com
Editor: Donna Wingate
Editorial assistant: Brynn Warriner
Designer: Joseph Logan
Design assistant: Rachel Hudson
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
Individual works of art appearing in this catalogue may be protected by

copyright in the United States of America or elsewhere, and may not be
reproduced in any form without the permission of the copyright owners.
12/12/14 1:25 PM
12/12/14 1:25 PM

Doris SALCEDO. Catálogo. Retrospectiva MCA Chicago Febrero de 2015

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Doris SALCEDO. Catálogo. Retrospectiva MCA Chicago Febrero de 2015

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Doris Salcedo

Edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine

Doris Salcedo accompanies the groundbreaking

3682 00a Salcedo Cover [mwd 12-1].indd 1

3682 00a Salcedo Cover [mwd 12-1].indd 2

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 1

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 2

Julie Rodrigues Widholm

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 3

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 4

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 5

Presenting Absence: The Work of Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedos Readymade Time

The Muted Drum: Doris Salcedos Material Elegies

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 6

Affairs of Colombia, Ministry of Culture of Colombia,

Curator and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 7

Organizing exhibitions of contemporary art affords

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 8

Guilherme Teixeira; White Cube; as well as several

material and documentation. In this regard, we also

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 9

also due to Janet Wolski in the Directors Office.

Director of Education Marissa Reyes, Programmer of

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 10

Without a documentary video, a core part of the

Doris Salcedos studio, a remarkable, astute, and

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 11

The work of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 12

materialexplorations have continued to seek out

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 13

communication that takes place between artwork

This exhibition also marks the US debut of both

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 14

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 15

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 16

The word imago designated the effigy of the absent, the

In equal measure poetic and political, the work of

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 17

such as Paul Celan, and Holocaust survivors such as

is not properly marked or mourned and when victims

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 18

is another crucial element of the artists workher

The seemingly infinite number of conflicts

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 19

excessive prosperity and excessive povertyit is in

Installation view, XXXI Saln Nacional de Artistas Colombianos,

begun creating her mature work, including Untitled

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 20

materials. The plastic dolls, cradles, and childrens

desaparecidos. La Casa Viuda I (199294; pp.11011)

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 21

door. A pair of doors are huddled together and set

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 22

human being when he or she receives something

pp.19293). Puncturing carries strong resonances

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 23

A Flor de Piel (test fragment), 2012

emphasize how silence, modesty, and quietude have

and ended at the site where he was killed. Here the

3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 24