Doris Salcedo
Atrabiliarios, 1996
Drywall, shoes, cow bladder, and surgical thread
47 x 83 1/16 inches (119.4 x 211 cm)

In Atrabiliarios, shoes worn and left behind are placed in wall niches and veiled by a stretched, cow‑bladder membrane sewn with surgical thread, so that they are seen only through a hazy, skin‑like layer. This tactile barrier enforces a distance between object and viewer, making absence palpable and transforming the shoes into relics of lives suspended between presence and erasure.

about the artist

Doris Salcedo 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.