Doris Salcedo has described her work as ‘a topology of mourning’; in each of her sculptures, installations and public projects Salcedo bear s witness to life that has become the casualty of a political agenda. As the artist attests, her practice is ‘[…] driven by the obsessive need to render visible the experiences of the most vulnerable and most anonymous victims of political violence. This viewpoint has confined my work into a fragile threshold, a threshold filled with impossible contradictions that will remain unsettled in each and every one of my pieces.’
Living and working in Bogotá, Salcedo draws on her own experience of Colombia s violent political history, as well as resp ond ing to wider global concerns . She focus es on those who have disappeared or are politically invisible – the most economically vulnerable and marginalised
members of society that suffer ‘social death’. Reflecting on a contemporary human condition scarred by war, migration, economic challenges and personal loss , the artist’s practice is further informed by a deep engagement with philosophy, literature and poetry. For Salcedo, the writings
of Jean-Luc Nancy, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Celan are particularly resonant, situated as they are by the primacy of the captive body, and biopolitical technologies of the state: ‘life as such becomes the stakes of politics’.