Doris Salcedo at the White Cube Gallery October 2007

Doris Salcedo Review
White Cube Gallery
Hoxton Square, London
15th September to 20th of October 2007


Doris Salcedo is one of the rare cases of Latin American artists that work and live in her country of Origin. Colombian by birth, she works and lives in Bogota where she produces most part of her work. She is known internationally as a great installation and sculpture artist. The fact that she still chooses to live in her country of origin is determinant for her work and the messages she is trying to send out to the general public.
The White Cube Gallery in London has put together an exhibition with sculptures made between 1989 and 2007, with the objective to complement the installation piece the artist will have in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, opening the 9th of October 2007, and in exhibition until April 2008.
At the white cube we could see sculptures where the artist was using everyday domestic and personal items, such as furniture and organic substances. The use of these types of materials is recurrent in Salcedo’s work, where she intends to produce pieces that evoke and address loss, grief, pain, memory, absence and mourning.
In this exhibition, pieces of furniture are merged together in perfect harmony, a product of a violent merge for sure, but of which there is no sign or violence whatsoever. Salcedo’s work is charged with political meanings and comments to the political and social situation lived in Colombia, it is about and in response to, all the violence and daily conflicts in Colombia.
The sculptures she creates from wardrobes, tables and chairs relate to the private live of the family space. The result is traumatized and dysfunctional objects that mirror the trauma families in particular and the Colombian population in general feel as a result of the violence to which they are subjected daily. These sculptures signify also the absence of the human body; it is Salcedo’s way of translating the Columbian population feelings of loss and absence.
In her own words, Salcedo explains this well when she says that “Sculpture for me is the giving of a material gift to the being who makes his presence felt in my work”.
Doris Salcedo’s works are objects found on an archeological expedition into past and recent past events in Colombia. Her works are invaluable contributions for an anthropology of pain, absence and survival/resistance in her country. They are unavoidable documents of remembrance and great additions to political and social memory in Colombia. True works of art!


Sidonio Costa
London
September 2007