A wooden chair, encased in concrete and pierced with metal rods.

Untitled

2020.25

Doris Salcedo

Colombian — 1997-1999

Doris Salcedo is an artist driven by grief. Her work relentlessly speaks to the civilians murdered, traumatised and “disappeared” in the civil war and illegal drug trade of her home of Colombia - she regularly conducts interviews with those affected, and frequents abandoned villages, murder sites, and mass graves. Her work seeks to bring the unimaginable violence faced by her loved ones into the domain of the domestic and the familiar, while also portraying how her own personal, immediate sphere is irrevocably altered by that same violence.

Untitled portrays the weight of absence by presenting the audience with a permanently empty chair, an image of violently ended domesticity. The chair speaks to both the absence of the deceased (is it their chair? Now entombed and inaccessible just as its owner is?) and the bereaved, forced to remain without the deceased (is it the bereaved’s chair? Now eternally weighed down and violated by loss?). The concrete and rebar evoke the mundanity and universality of the pain, but also the nature of grief as a construction material, and one that forms the basis of so much of the world in which we live.

Salcedo’s process is deliberately labour-intensive. To create Untitled, she had to slice a wooden chair into pieces, pierce it with steel rods, develop a mold for the concrete, pour it, shape it, seal it and through this process transform a mundane, generic object into a deliberately ambiguous and thought-provoking image in order to create a site for public dialogue about trauma and grief. Where much of grief labour is concerned with caring for the dead, honouring their memory and preparing for life without them, Salcedo forces her audience to instead to do the work of spending time with their own pain. In her artist’s statement, Salcedo declares that "There is nothing more human than mourning, it restores humanity". By bringing her own mourning into her art, by making the public personal and the personal public, she invites us to share in our mourning together and to be upset, but unafraid, to do the work of grieving.

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