What is no longer

[[{"fid":"741216","view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"119","width":"129","style":"float: left;","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]Colombian artist Doris Salcedo uses found and familiar objects for her painstaking and impossibly precise process of creating art about mourning. 

By Emily Vides

An assemblage of chairs that is no longer chairs, an impossible conflation of familiar furniture, a shroud of rose petals and a spectral blouse woven with sewing needles. This is what you will see at Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning running Nov. 4, 2016-April 9, 2017 at Harvard Art Museums. An opening celebration will take place 6 p.m. Nov. 2 and features a discussion between Salcedo and Elaine Scarry, Harvard Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value and author of The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. The event is free and open to the public, and the galleries will remain open afterward until 9 p.m.

[[{"fid":"741491","view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"311","width":"330","style":"float: left;","alt":"Doris Salcedo, Disremembered II, 2014. Silk thread and nickel-plated steel.","title":"Doris Salcedo, Disremembered II","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]In a gallery tour, Mary Schneider Enriquez ’81, AM ’87, curator of modern and contemporary art at Harvard, explained that everything in Salcedo's work, which focuses on societal and personal pain resulting from political violence, is delibrate: the dim lighting, the hushed rooms, the illogical placement of familiar objects and the empty space around them create a haunting atomosphere. Each work is a handmade ritual of mourning, mourning without reflection. These are not your typical war monuments that include literal reflection in the mourning process: these works are not about us but about another person's pain, our inability to ever truly understand that pain and what is left when that person is gone. Salcedo's work comes from this awareness and empathy but is never bloody, didactic or moralistic; it's free of narrative and full of absense, of what is no longer and can never again be there.

[[{"fid":"741501","view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"275","width":"275","style":"float: right;","title":"Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel, 2013","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]It is also fascinating to behold. A Flor de Piel takes materiality to a new extreme. Made as a flower offering to a nurse who was kidnapped and tortured to death during the Colombian war, Salcedo created a room-sized shroud made by suturing rose petals together in a sheet that looks both like skin and pressed autumn leaves. 

It is a moving experience standing in front of the works. Salcedo's art requires slow contemplation and prolonged engagement and resists rational understanding. I found myself trying to find the right metaphor to translate what I was seeing and experiencing into something understandable, but meaning kept turning away leaving me blank, forced to confront loss and grief and absense.

In Disremembered II, Salcedo wove blouses from silk threads and filled the garment with tiny sewing needles. The needles, instead of making clothing as they were intended to do, become the fabric - impossibile fabric making an impossible shirt. I thought, "Oh, it's a hairshirt. I understand a hairshirt." But wearing a hairshirt was a choice, and the pain of loss through violence evoked in this garment is nothing anyone has the freedom to choose.

[[{"fid":"741471","view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"470","width":"272","style":"float: left;","alt":"Doris Salcedo and Mary Schneider-Enriquez","title":"Doris Salcedo and Mary Schneider-Enriquez","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]In the Q&A with the the artist after the gallery talk, Salcedo said that her subject matter, namely mourning after violence, was never a choice. She is an artist, and that is the reality of her country of Colombia. She said that "making art gives us back some of the dignity that was taken [from us] by violent acts. Art is a way of defeating death." She paraphrased Walter Benjamin when she said that it's imperative to narrate the past because understanding the past will change both the present and the future. She spoke of the intentional and inherent contradiction at the heart of her work.

Go see it, alone. Fill your heart; don't shy away.

Schneider Enriquez, who wrote her doctoral thesis at Harvard on Salcedo's work, will give a gallery talks 12:30-1 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16 and  Thursday, Dec, 1. Jerónimo Duarte Riascos, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, will give a gallery talk in Spanish 12:30-1 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 14.

Also, Harvard Art Museums will present a monthly screening of the 25-minute film Doris Salcedo’s Public Works (2015), which documents the site-specific works and ephemeral public projects that have formed a central aspect of Salcedo's artistic production in the past 15 years. The first is 2 p.m. Friday, Nov. 18.