Material Witness: Doris Salcedo's Practice as an Address on Political Violence through Materiality

This dissertation investigates Doris Salcedo's practice and the means by which she addresses political violence relying on materials rather than figural images. She evokes the imminence of violence, the presence of the absent victims, and the hidden wounds of the survivors. An examination of her sculptures and installations begins by focusing on the socio-political context and history of prolonged civil violence Salcedo has experienced during her life in Colombia. Following this I analyze: the artist's deliberate choice of sculpture as her medium; her preference for everyday objects, such as domestic furniture and materials charged with meaning but without reference to specific victims; her rigorous, highly involved process; and finally, her emphasis on surface as an evocative element integral to the work. The ideas of Beatriz Gonzalez, Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp are considered to the extent to which they were engaged in or contested by Salcedo in developing her practice. Finally, by analyzing a particular body of Salcedo's work, I propose a series of six visual strategies the artist employs to convey through materials without pictorializing the enduring effects of political violence: 1) the suggestion of space to place, 2) the sense of the uncanny and anthropomorphism, 3) the materiality of the heavily worked surfaces of her sculptures, 4) the weight of time as a material presence, 5) the correspondence of body to scale, and 6) the sense of disjunction and disorientation. Over the course of her career, I propose that Salcedo has focused on two principal concerns: political violence, first in Colombia and now throughout the world; and materiality, making materials speak on behalf of the victims through a complex, painstaking process using increasingly ephemeral materials. I conclude that Salcedo's project pushes materiality beyond its expected parameters and that her recent work challenges the definition of sculpture and the object, as well as the idea of the temporal, in an audacious expression born of her longstanding vision and commitment to the victims of political violence.