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’.
Institute of Art History, Faculty of Culture and Arts, Warsaw University
This project is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Art Histories initiative.
