Doris Salcedo

11 rooms in Materials and Objects

Art that reflects on the violence and displacement caused by colonialism, discrimination, poverty and war

Much of Salcedo’s work was made in response to the long-running conflicts and cycles of violence that have affected her homeland, Colombia, for many decades. She spends time with victims of violence, listening to their first-hand experiences. Her sculptures are often composed of found objects such as furniture and everyday domestic items, manipulated to evoke a sense of trauma and loss.

This room includes some of her earliest sculptures. They were made in 1986-7, specifically for the XXXI National Salon of Colombian Artists in Medellín. At the time, Medellín was the centre of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. Economic hardship and the constant threat of violence led many young men to take up work as drug runners and hired assassins. Salcedo used discarded hospital furniture as a focus for a meditation about the tragic cycle of life and death. Various bed frames, a crib, and a gynaecologist’s foot stool have been cut and reassembled to produce unnerving standing structures, each deliberately discoloured and covered with dust.

Also in this room are some of the digital visualisations created by Salcedo before she installed Shibboleth 2007 at Tate Modern. This 548-foot-long crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall was intended to highlight the divisions and vulnerabilities that institutions and societies often seek to hide. Though it was later filled with concrete, the crack left a scar in the architecture that is still visible.

Tate Modern
Natalie Bell Building Level 4 West

Getting Here

Until 23 June 2024

Free

Doris Salcedo, Untitled 1987

Shortly after returning to her native Bogotà from New York in the mid-1980s, Salcedo created a series of sculptures made from discarded pieces of furniture such as the bedsteads used here. These objects conjure up ideas of protection, care and confinement. Broken and dysfunctional, the beds have been tied together with animal fibre in what appears to be a repair doomed from the outset to failure. The result is a construction whose fragility becomes a poetic metaphor for the human condition.

Gallery label, July 2007

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Doris Salcedo, Untitled 1986–7

Doris Salcedo born 1958 Untitled 1986–7Steel, wood, plastic and dustOverall display dimensions variable

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Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth II 2007

Shibboleth II is a medium-size digital photograph by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo that depicts the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, with a long narrow crack running along its floor. The print is part of a portfolio of four photographs each showing different views of the same scene, including Shibboleth I (Tate P20334), Shibboleth III (Tate P20336) and Shibboleth IV (Tate P20337), and the portfolio as a whole is number one in an edition of forty-five plus ten artist’s proofs. The photographs were made as part of Salcedo’s 2007 installation project for the Unilever Series at Tate Modern, also titled Shibboleth, which involved the artist creating a deep fissure in the floor of the Turbine Hall that stretched from one end of the gallery to the other, into which she placed a concrete cast of a Colombian rock face with a wire chain-link fence set into it. These photographs are digital composites made up of images of the Turbine Hall seen from four different angles and photographs that Salcedo took of a small-scale model of the cracked floor that she made in her studio in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth IV 2007

Shibboleth IV is a medium-size digital photograph by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo that depicts the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, with a long narrow crack running along its floor. The print is part of a portfolio of four photographs each showing different views of the same scene, including Shibboleth I (Tate P20334), Shibboleth II (Tate P20335) and Shibboleth III (Tate P20336), and the portfolio as a whole is number one in an edition of forty-five plus ten artist’s proofs. The photographs were made as part of Salcedo’s 2007 installation project for the Unilever Series at Tate Modern, also titled Shibboleth, which involved the artist creating a deep fissure in the floor of the Turbine Hall that stretched from one end of the gallery to the other, into which she placed a concrete cast of a Colombian rock face with a wire chain-link fence set into it. These photographs are digital composites made up of images of the Turbine Hall seen from four different angles and photographs that Salcedo took of a small-scale model of the cracked floor that she made in her studio in Bogotá, Colombia.

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