Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory
and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous
places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the
disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the
role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally
renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal.
In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into intimate encounters
with Salcedo's art, encouraging us to consider each work as a
"theoretical object" that invites--and demands--certain kinds of
considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges
widely through Salcedo's work, from Salcedo's Atrabiliarios series--in
which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos ("the
disappeared") from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia--to
Shibboleth, Salcedo's once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate
Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that
stretched the length of the museum hall's concrete floor. In each
instance, Salcedo's installations speak for themselves, utilizing
household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to
explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet
Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature
of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time,
and space in order to contend with Salcedo's powerful sculptures and
installations.
An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, Of What One Cannot Speak
takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering--yet
still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.
