artnexus #19

Tenacity is a word that is synonymous with the work of Doris Salcedo: tenacity in her research and in her desire to know and to create, to penetrate into the painful facets of Colombian reality. Her work relates the experiences lived by those who have been hit by violence, but her approach is far from being mere denunciation or a call for vindication. What she endeavors to do is to understand through direct experience, which means suffering the effects of such violence. Thus, her constructed objects intuitively evoke the need to know such situations through the little things of everyday which enhance the observer's awareness of a reality which he tries to ignore. This reflection on violence and the displacements which it brings in its wake is articulated through individual situations which she shows well and which are basic to the construction of her images, images which seek to go beyond mere testimony to foster memory of a world which consciously or unconsciously is forgotten.

Her work will be traveling extensively in the coming years to important exhibition centers: the Hirshhorn Smithsonian in Washington, the Center of Contemporary Art in Thier, the Center of Contemporary Art in Roquefort, France, as well as to the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California, and the New Museum of New York.

IVONNE PINI