doris salcedo
Doris Salcedo (b. 1958, Bogotá, Colombia) situates her work in the weight of absence, memory, and trauma, transforming everyday materials into objects that carry the traces of loss and survival. Her use of furniture, concrete, textiles, and earth operates semiotically, each scar, seam, or fissure signaling histories of violence, displacement, or mourning. In pieces like Shibboleth or Noviembre 6 y 7, the material itself becomes a language, compressing time, event, and emotion into a presence that is at once tangible and haunting, asking viewers to read absence as meaning, and to feel the traces of human vulnerability encoded into form.
artworks
Together, these works articulate Salcedo’s rigorous attention to material as a semiotic field where memory and loss are encoded into form. In Untitled, the weight of concrete compresses the geometry of a chair into a solid presence that still feels haunted by what is missing, while in Atrabiliarios the translucent membrane obscures the familiar, turning absence into a figure of tension and longing. Both pieces hinge on transformation—objects of everyday life become carriers of historical and emotional resonance, their altered surfaces insisting that material itself can gesture toward what language cannot fully capture.
