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Making the Invisible Visible, Speaking the Unspeakable: Doris Salcedo’s Performative Art

Festival ColorEs Colombia | Lecture by Mieke Bal on Doris Salcedo’s Performative Art

We are proud to be part of the ColorEs Colombia by organizing a lecture by Mieke Bal. In the face of the violence in the world and the ease with which we seem to condone it, Doris Salcedo’s cultural diagnosis concerns the systematic erasure – not only of the perpetrators of the violence, of all political colors, but also of the public at large who turn a blind eye.

 

Doris Salcedo. Photo David Heald – courtesy, public domain Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Persistently throughout her career as an artist of sculpture, installation, and interventions, Salcedo labors to undo erasure, forgetting, violence-toleration and other forms of generalized cultural complicity. Starting with her most recent performative installation Palimpsest, then revisiting some earlier works, the lecture by Mieke Bal analyzes the process of retrieval Salcedo stages.

Dinner after the lecture
After the lecture, a homemade fresh dinner wil be served for 15 euros.
Our members will receive a 15% reduction.

Time schedule October 11th
17:00 doors open
17:30 – 18:45 lecture Mieke Bal
19:00 optional dinner

Register
Please register for lecture and/or dinner with this link

 

Amsterdamse Academische Club
Oudezijds Achterburgwal 235
1012 DL Amsterdam
Twl. +31 (0)20 5251570

Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian-born sculptor who lives and works in Bogotá. Salcedo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in 1980, before traveling to New York City, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, and is generally composed of commonplace items such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, and rose petals.

Salcedo’s work gives form to pain, trauma, and loss, while creating space for individual and collective mourning. These themes stem from her own personal history. Members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in politically troubled Colombia. Much of her work deals with the fact that, while the death of a loved one can be mourned, their disappearance leaves an unbearable emptiness.

Doris Salcedo is the eighth artist to have been commissioned to produce work for the turbine hall of the Tate Modern gallery in London. Her piece, Shibboleth (2007), is a 167-metre-long crack in the hall’s floor that Salcedo says “represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe”.

 

[from Wikipedia]

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