Doris Salcedo Turns Fragility Into a Form of Resistance

There is a hushed intensity that follows Doris Salcedo wherever her work lands. For those who have tracked her trajectory across the art landscape—from the fracturing of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall floor with Shibboleth in 2007 to her acclaimed 2015 retrospective at the Guggenheim—her return to New York feels like a summons. Opening November 13 at White Cube, Salcedo’s newest exhibition marks her first major solo presentation in the city in over a decade. It brings together two new bodies of work, created over three years of intensive studio labor, that directly confront the contemporary global tragedies of forced migration and engineered conflict.

At the center of the exhibition stands House (2023–26), a life-size, ghostly structure woven entirely from strands of human hair. Expanding upon the thematic framework of Uprooted—her installation on climate-induced migration showcased at the 2023 Sharjah Biennial—House addresses the concept of “domicide.” “Losing a home is not merely losing a physical roof; it is the catastrophic destruction of the central pillar of human identity,” Salcedo told me in her studio in the Chapinero neighborhood of Bogotá a few months before completing House. By fabricating a home out of hair—a human material that outlasts the rest of the body—Salcedo aims to create a haunting tribute to the millions of people currently drifting across borders without a place of their own.

Salcedo also crafted small-scale works for the show. During our visit, several of her assistants were using special drills to bore minuscule holes into individual grains of rice. They were painstakingly fabricating Grains of Sorrow, an installation of 47 vessels sculpted from rice and human hair. Spread across the floor, the agonizingly precise structures allude to man-made starvation—a dehumanizing, calculated weapon of war in geopolitical conflicts. The fragility of both House and Grains of Sorrow is intentional, Salcedo says. It forces those who view the pieces—as well as the institutions that display them—to consider the realities of extremely vulnerable communities that may never set foot in a museum or gallery.

Salcedo, 68, has piercing, kind eyes, and a mane of silvery hair that resembles a gathering storm cloud. She grew up in Bogotá, against the backdrop of a protracted internal armed conflict—a reality that she has always addressed in her sculptures by tackling loss, forced disappearances, and structural trauma. “Since I was a little girl, all I wanted to do was become an artist,” Salcedo said. “I was a disaster in school and couldn’t do anything else. But I wanted to be an artist who spoke about Colombia, because that was my context growing up. I thought that art narratives about Europe and the United States had been told thousands of times. And in Colombia at that time, addressing violence was inevitable.”

Her early pieces were explicitly tied to the survivors of Colombia’s gruesome killings, many of whom she met personally, investigating and documenting their stories as if she were a journalist or detective. Plastered stacks of shirts pierced by metal rods alluded to the massacres that were commonplace in the countryside in the ’80s; a crib wrapped in mesh made you wonder about the missing baby inside. In Atrabiliarios, widely considered her breakout series, Salcedo collected the shoes of murdered women, shielded them with translucent cow bladders, and encased them in recessed wall niches, like reliquaries in a church. In 2018, Salcedo opened Fragmentos in Bogotá, which she describes as a space for art and memory. The floor of the arrestingly contemporary gallery, which also functions as a memorial, is composed of metal tiles cast by female victims of violence using melted weapons surrendered by the FARC, Colombia’s biggest guerrilla movement, after a peace accord was signed with the government in 2016. It has become an important convening space for artists, scholars, students, and everyday visitors.

While many of Salcedo’s early pieces were explicitly linked to Colombia’s turmoil, her footprint has steadily expanded over the years to address universal crises. “The kinds of conflicts I witnessed in Colombia have become almost commonplace—the same kind of violence, the same kind of corruption,” Salcedo says. “That’s why I believe I have a great responsibility with my work. I know firsthand about that violence. I’m in a privileged position to talk about what is happening all over the world.”

At a certain point during our conversation, I ask Salcedo about the personal toll her artistic practice might take on her. After all, she’s spent decades processing atrocities. How do you carry on when your mission is to make it impossible for ordinary people to set aside what they would never want to confront? “Of course I’ve paid a price for it,” Salcedo says. “Pain hurts and pain has consequences, on all levels. But not all of it is negative. On one hand, witnessing pain is terrible. But on the other hand, I learn a lot from the victims of violence—from their resilience, their ability to laugh again, to rebuild their lives from nothing, from the courage they have. It’s not just about how they endure catastrophes, but about how they manage to overcome them. Next to them, we are all very, very weak.”