FEBRUARY 23, 2023. KATE MOTHES
“Uprooted” (2020-22), 804 dead trees and steel, 300 x 65 x 50 meters. Installation view at Sharjah Biennial 15, Kalba Ice Factory, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2023. All images © Doris Salcedo. Photos by Juan Castro
In Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s monumental installation titled “Uprooted” at the Sharjah Biennial 15, home is rooted in the mind.
We use the phrase “to put down roots” to express a desire to make a place our own, whether purchasing a house or deciding to live in one location for many years. A sense of community, family, being surrounded by one’s belongings, and feeling safe and secure all help to form the idea of home, which evokes myriad emotions and associations—especially if any of those fundamentals are missing. In Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s monumental installation titled “Uprooted” at the Sharjah Biennial 15, the concept remains nebulous.
Salcedo is known for sculptures and installations that incorporate quotidian, domestic objects like tables or garments. Her practice often takes historical events as a starting point, focusing on the effects of major political actions on people’s everyday mental and emotional experiences. “Conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means,” she once cataclysmically cracked the floor of Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern and lowered more than 1,500 chairs between two buildings in Istanbul to address displacement caused by war. In “Uprooted,” the theme of migration continues in the form of hundreds of dead trees that have been shaped into the recognizable silhouette of a house, its meticulously constructed walls and pitched roof gradually morphing into a thicket. […]
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