Acquisitions/
1994/
Doris Salcedo/
Untitled (Armoire)

Doris Salcedo offers an elegiac meditation on the violence that is a daily reality in her native Colombia. Since 1988 the artist has interviewed people whose relatives have "disappeared" by order of the military or paramilitary squads associated with Colombia's civil war and illegal drug trade. Venturing into the countryside with representatives of human rights groups and churches, the artist regularly visits abandoned villages, murder sites, and mass graves. Salcedo's sculptures and installations, made with found items of domestic furniture and other personal objects, bear the memory of pain and suffering. Tattered and worn, they stand as humble monuments to their lost, silenced, or forgotten owners.

Untitled (Armoire) is part of a series in which Salcedo buried domestic furniture and other personal objects in cement, stripping these utilitarian pieces of their functions and turning them into humble monuments to their lost, silenced, or forgotten owners. The artist explained, “There was one widow . . . who told me how difficult it was to continue living with objects that are reminders of her husband. . . . Every day you sit at the dining table and the empty chair is there, screaming the absence of that person. It can become a very difficult object to live with. So I tried to make those objects silent, encasing them in cement.”