Doris Salcedo’s art against forgetting: blood and roses

“Objects are reminiscent of a person’s life. A person leaves traces through the clothes, the furniture they use, the tables and chairs that await them. If someone is violently disappearing in a brutal way, then these objects literally cry out their absence,” says Doris Salcedo.

The Colombian, born in Bogotá in 1958 and confronted with the horrors of 45 years of bloody civil war between the government, drug cartels and political groups in her homeland, gives a voice to human misery behind abandoned everyday objects: the brittle sculptures, objects and installations of the western Artist celebrated around the world, in Japan and recently also in the United Arab Emirates, address violence of all kinds, not least sexual violence against women.

In Colombia as elsewhere, she uses the suffering, desperation and trauma of the victims of kidnapping, torture, murder and rape, war and displacement as an opportunity to use her empathetic art to fight against the forgetting of such crimes.

Doris Salcedo grew up in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, which she describes as a “disaster epicenter”. Since 1985 she lives and works there again. She studied painting and art history at the University of Bogotá, then sculpture at New York University. Although her works often result from concrete events, they have universal validity. Stylistically extremely imaginative, they revolve around loss, individual pain and collective grief as well as their social coping. The actual horrors are never shown directly, but illustrated by supposedly irrelevant materials.

For her outstanding oeuvre, Doris Salcedo was honored in Lübeck in 2017 with the Possehl Prize for international art, which was awarded for the first time, and with a first exhibition in Germany, whose eponymous group of works “Tabula Rasa” dealt with the horror of the rapes of women in the Colombian civil war.

The Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel is now the first Swiss museum to dedicate an extensive retrospective to Doris Salcedo on 1,300 square meters with eight series of works and a total of around 100 individual works from public and private collections. In the Fondation’s museum building, designed by the Italian star architect Renzo Piano, there is enough space for Salcedo’s often expansive, unusual art.

Objects are reminiscent of a person’s life. When someone is violently and violently disappearing, these objects scream their absence.

Doris Salcedo

From the very beginning, Salcedo’s expansive installations caused a stir. “Untitled”, realized in 2003 for the 8th International Istanbul Biennale, turned out to be particularly monumental. The object consisted of around 1550 wooden chairs piled between two buildings, which commemorated the history of the migration and expulsion of Armenian and Jewish families from Istanbul. For “Shibboleth” in 2007, Salcedo created a crevasse-like chasm in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, which ran through the entire space and thus made social isolation and exclusion, but also separation, spatially tangible.

For the first time in German-speaking countries, Beyeler has been showing Salcedo’s 400 square meter Madrid installation “Palimpsest” (2013 – 2017) since October 2022 as a prelude to the current show. It is dedicated to the refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic over the past 20 years on the perilous journey to Europe. For five years, she researched the names of the victims, who now – in the sense of the title – “made legible” appear on sand-colored floor tiles, washed with water and then disappear again.

Salcedo’s works symbolize both fragile vulnerability and violence in an amazing way. For “Atrabiliarios” (1996), for example, behind a veil of vision she arranged worn shoes that had become useless on an exhibition wall. They belonged to women who disappeared without a trace as victims of violence in Colombia.

The Basel exhibition confronts visitors with Salcedo’s “A Flor de Piel” (2011/12) as a particularly touching, poetic work of her career, according to critics the “boldest” and most fleeting work. The 5 by 4.5 meter carpet is reminiscent of blood, flesh and wounds. On purpose: the quilt made of thousands of preserved, delicately hand-sewn dark red rose petals is a reminder of the cruel fate of a kidnapped Colombian nurse who was tortured to death.

In the room next to it, the tables from “Plegaria Muda” (2008–2010) are lined up as “Silent Prayer”. It’s about gang crime that Salcedo experienced in Los Angeles, about victim and perpetrator pairs. You can see two tables stacked on top of each other like a coffin, the tops separated by a layer of earth. Blades of grass sprout from it as a sign of hope in the act of mourning.

Stylistically very different “Disremembered” (2014/15, 2020/21): The blouse-like fabric made of delicate raw silk, pierced by 12,000 silvery shimmering needles, literally gets under your skin. They tell of the neglected, endless pain of those Chicago mothers whose teenage sons met violent deaths as gang members. The artist has spoken to many of these women. Likewise with victims of rape and people fleeing political persecution and hunger. Or before climate change, as recently in “Uprooted”, realized for the Biennale 2023 in Sharjah, Arabia.

Salcedo’s highly self-committing art requires years of intense preparation, research and site exploration. Wherever she can, the artist is increasingly naming victims of violence and including those who are suffering in her work. She does not see herself as a lone wolf, but as part of an ensemble that realizes artistic projects together. Her art, “that’s not me,” she says, “that’s collective work.”