Doris Salcedo

Bio from White Cube:

"Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.

Her early sculptures and installations, such as La Casa Viuda (1992-1995), combined domestic furniture with textiles and clothing. Salcedo derived her materials from research into Colombia’s recent political history, so these belongings, suffused with the patina of use, were directly linked to personal and political tragedy. During the past few years, Salcedo’s work has become increasingly installation-based, using the gallery spaces or unusual locations to create vertiginous environments charged with politics and history. Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002) was a commemoration of the seventeenth anniversary of the violent seizing of the Supreme Court, Bogotá on 6 and 7 November, 1985. Salcedo sited the work in the new Palace of Justice where, over the course of 53 hours (the duration of the siege), wooden chairs were slowly lowered against the façade of the building from different points on its roof, creating “an act of memory” in order to re-inhabit this space of forgetting. In 2003, in Istanbul, she made an installation on an unremarkable street comprising 1,600 wooden chairs stacked precariously in the space between two buildings. In 2005, at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Salecdo re-worked one of the institution’s major rooms by extending the existing majestic, vaulted brick ceiling of the gallery. The installation subtly transformed the existing space, evoking thoughts of incarceration and entombment."

Her chairs piece is so alarmingly beautiful!!!!!Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.

'Her early sculptures and installations, such as La Casa Viuda (1992-1995), combined domestic furniture with textiles and clothing. Salcedo derived her materials from research into Colombia’s recent political history, so these belongings, suffused with the patina of use, were directly linked to personal and political tragedy. During the past few years, Salcedo’s work has become increasingly installation-based, using the gallery spaces or unusual locations to create vertiginous environments charged with politics and history. Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002) was a commemoration of the seventeenth anniversary of the violent seizing of the Supreme Court, Bogotá on 6 and 7 November, 1985. Salcedo sited the work in the new Palace of Justice where, over the course of 53 hours (the duration of the siege), wooden chairs were slowly lowered against the façade of the building from different points on its roof, creating “an act of memory” in order to re-inhabit this space of forgetting. In 2003, in Istanbul, she made an installation on an unremarkable street comprising 1,600 wooden chairs stacked precariously in the space between two buildings. In 2005, at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Salecdo re-worked one of the institution’s major rooms by extending the existing majestic, vaulted brick ceiling of the gallery. The installation subtly transformed the existing space, evoking thoughts of incarceration and entombment."

Her chair piece - i remember seeing an image years ago - still blows me away.

In her conceptual speak on memory - chairs are so interesting. Our bodies sit in them, leaving sweat, a trace of thread, a smell - on these wooden chairs. On fabric chairs - an imprint, a stain.

The way they tower up and tumble over each other - in her discussion of the memory of war - is especially powerful since the chairs stand in for the piles of bodies - captured between these two buildings - the small space between. How amazing that chairs piled up can so easily point to the bodies that would sit in them.

Her other famous piece I've seen before is the split in the flooring - like a fault line - at the Tate.
"Shibboleth"
from tate website:

"A shibboleth, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation; a word or sound very difficult for foreigners to pronounce correctly.’ It is, therefore, a way of separating one people from another."

"Walking down Salcedo’s incised line, particularly if you know about her previous work, might well prompt a broader consideration of power’s divisive operations as encoded in the brutal narratives of colonialism, their unhappy aftermaths in postcolonial nations, and in the stand off between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres."

I do wonder how she did that fault line and how they repaired it etc.