Doris Salcedo

(Bogotà, Colombia, 1958)
Doris Salcedo explores the ‘dark’ side of globalization, and creates a form of spatial poetry, both elegiac and epic, ordinary and monumental, created to evoke intense emotions that are able to raise consciousness so that the pain and human suffering which she acutely perceives in the world, and which are the principle sources for her art, will not be in vain. Aesthetic emotion is for Salcedo deeply related to the political – it is the political, and art is the terrain where the personal and intimate meet the collective and the public.
Untitled (2008) belongs to a series, which was created since 1989 by casting concrete into pieces of old furniture – tables, chairs, dressers, closets, even beds. These works are dense and heavy; they carry the traces and the burden of past lives through references to the absent bodies they once harboured. They suggest layers of experience, the weight of loss and the density of life.