Doris Salcedo, 1958

Doris Salcedo is a Columbian-born sculptor who lives and works in Bogotá. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1980 before traveling to New York where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She subsequently returned to Bogotá to teach at Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Her work, which is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, generally consists of items of furniture. As an artist, Salcedo makes use of household articles that become charged with meaning and importance as a result of their having been constantly used in the course of people’s everyday lives. She employs these in sculptures and installations that resemble the byproducts of political and intellectual archaeology. She frequently takes specific historical events as the starting-point for her works, revealing their significances and contradictions, and pointing to their direct and indirect consequences.

For the 8th Istanbul Biennial in 2003, Doris Salcedo created a huge outdoor sculpture consisting of hundreds of wooden chairs heaped up in a narrow vacant lot between two apartment buildings. Reaching the height of a small building, the work, titled Istanbul Project, is a striking statement, both formally and visually but also evokes the sudden disappearance of human beings, like the numerous victims of so-called “disappearances” in her country and elsewhere.