Doris Salcedo Commemorates Colombian Victims in New Exhibition

Despite the acclaim her sculptures receive for their sociopolitical implications, Doris Salcedo identifies solely as a maker of art. “I am an artist,” she said at the press preview of her new exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums. “I am not a political activist; I am not in social justice. I am an artist: That’s all I am and all I want to do.” As an observer of the political turmoil and oppression in her home country, Colombia, she feels that she could only offer her empathy as consolation. Her art is thus for an unnamed and unseen audience: the victims of the tragedies. “Whose experience am I honoring?” she said. “The dialogue starts there.” But rather than showing the victims directly, her works are removed from the violence and instead use everyday objects that represent the places of mourning and pain. Hence the title of her exhibition, “The Materiality of Mourning,” which is currently on display at the Harvard Art Museums.

The exhibition features four installations that highlight her work since 2001, beginning with large wooden tables filled with cement. Here she capitalizes on the unsettling feeling of an invaded home: The jarring and deliberate juxtaposition of warmth of the wood and cold density of the cement suggest that something slightly awry and deeply disturbing has occurred. This unlikely combination of materials also puts her technical achievements on full display, which are made possible by close collaboration with engineers and architects. “She sets out to achieve the impossible—and she does it every time,” said Narayan Khandekar, the Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. To Salcedo, the difficulties of constructing her works are essential to express the complexities of the victims’ experiences that outsiders can never fully understand.

The installations that follow display a collection of steel chairs that mimic Colombian furniture, a skin-like sheet of rose petals, and ghosty silk threads woven with nickel pieces. The steel chairs, like the wooden tables, suggest the opposite of balance, logic, and comfort: The metal uncharacteristically crumples under the weight of an absent being, and despite the seeming stability of the chairs, some of their legs are missing. This strangeness highlights the irreversible damage that violence has on households. Mary Schneider Enriquez, Harvard Art Museum’s Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, said, quoting Salcedo herself, “All that is normal is forever strange.”

According to Enriquez, strenuous planning has gone into the making and exhibiting of the four pieces. Each handmade gesture of mourning was done with meticulous intention, from the low-hanging lights, the placement of crinkles in the sheet of petals, to the configuration of the gallery spaces themselves. Salcedo’s efforts all aim at fully honoring the experiences of the dead. She mentions in each step of her art making process, she directs herself to the aftermath of trauma in order to resonate with the pain and mourning that provides the foundation for her sculptures and installations. The layouts of her installations were perfected over the course of eight days, and she treated every moment as an act of mourning that needed to be felt alone.

When Salcedo spoke to a crowd prior to her exhibition’s opening, her demeanor matched the gravity she continuously brings to her work. Dressed in all black with perfectly styled curls atop her composed disposition, she expressed a conviction in her work that rooted her to Colombia despite its broken history and corrupt government. At the mention of the country’s recent referendum, she wiped away tears. “All my life I have been in mourning because of political problems,” she said, “The possibility of having a better country is gone.” Given the dire situations, she hopes that she could be one voice of Colombia, together with many others.

“Art should be articulated by the experiences of others. So my art is for them,” she said.