Doris Salcedo

"The loss of a home is more than simply losing a structure or a roof; it is the catastrophic loss of a central pillar of our life."

— Doris Salcedo

White Cube presents Doris Salcedo's (b. 1958, Bogotá, Colombia) first major exhibition in New York since her acclaimed US retrospective, which opened in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and travelled to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Pérez Art Museum Miami. The exhibition presents two new bodies of work that address the devastation of displacement and the basic human need for home and sustenance.

At the centre of the exhibition stands House (2023–26), a monumental yet ethereal structure fabricated from human hair. The result of painstaking work that involved the knotting and weaving of individual strands, House sees a continuation of themes from Salcedo's prize-winning installation Uprooted (2020–22), which was presented at the 2023 Sharjah Biennial and explored climate crisis migration. On the gallery's other level, Salcedo presents Grains of Sorrow, an installation comprising 47 vessels exclusively made of rice and human hair. Exhibited on the gallery floor, these small sculptures are carefully constructed as a counter to the dehumanisation of man made starvation, still used today as a weapon of war.

Both House and Grains of Sorrow took three years and many hands to make, in a meticulous process that itself constitutes an act of devotion and an attempt at restoring dignity to the victims. The artist connects her way of working to the intensive nature of labour in the Global South, which drives the modern economy yet too often goes unrecognised. Her collaborative approach is fundamental not only to the physical creation of the works but also to the spirit of the anti-monument. ‘A collective statement is far more powerful than a lonely solo voice,' she said. ‘It becomes like a chorus, and a really potent one.'

Further information about the exhibition, including installation images, featured artworks and an exhibition text, will be available ahead of the opening.

Doris Salcedo has described her work as ‘a topology of mourning'; in each of her sculptures, installations and public projects Salcedo bears witness to life that has become the casualty of a political agenda. As the artist attests, her practice is ‘[…] driven by the obsessive need to render visible the experiences of the most vulnerable and most anonymous victims of political violence. This viewpoint has confined my work into a fragile threshold, a threshold filled with impossible contradictions that will remain unsettled in each and every one of my pieces.'