Salcedo @The Guggenheim

I went to New York a few days ago as a form of escape, intrigued by news of the Doris Salcedo retrospective at the Guggenheim. I’d seen a few of her sculptures and wanted to see more. I sensed her work might offer a temporary way around the high pitch of violence continuously audible here and abroad—racist, misogynist, drug-related, random, terrorist, tyranny-driven, conflict-driven—violence that illustrates just how eminently capable we are as a species to objectify one another, to devalue another’s life. The need to address this dark human capacity is at the core of Doris Salcedo’s thirty years of making art.

Prompted originally by violence in her native Colombia—by the massacres and disappearances of thousands whose bodies went to mass graves unaccounted for—and by the effects those violent events have wrought, she has since assumed as her subject matter, or as her point of contemplation, aspects of violence suffered by other groups and populations as well: in Istanbul; Guantánamo; refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East; gang shootings in Los Angeles; to name several. Her materials are shoes and clothing, salvaged furniture, earth, concrete, animal skin and fiber, human hair, sewing needles, and silk thread. In one of her pieces, rose petals were treated to retain their color and flexibility and were then sewn together to create an expansive mantle. Her images are often synecdochic. The shoes encased in a wall, behind parchment, for example, as in the above photo, speak to the fact that the remains of bodies in mass graves can often be identified by the shoes lying nearby. In the photo below, the human hair visible on the surface of the wooden table has been actually stitched into the fiber of the wood, alluding to the physicality of a person no longer present.