Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations about and in response to the violence and conflict of everyday life in her native country of Colombia, South America. Her work has been described a "mental archaeology" because she uses domestic items to impart meaning much beyond utilitarian usage.

"Salcedo sees her art as representing a social conscience, with her role as a perpetual witness. In a sense the work gives voice to those in Colombian society who are violently repressed, silenced and controlled by fear, and provides the focus for a sense of community, even defiance, though a collective memory and a shared experience of loss."

The materials she works with: simple furniture like wardrobes, tables and chairs, clothing, thread and animal skin, "speak of the sanctity and familiarity of everyday domestic life. Through her molding or reshaping of these pieces - embedding a chair within a doorframe, grafting two tables into an unstable hybrid - she creates a traumatized, dysfunctional, object." (dareonline)

"During the past few years, Salcedo's work has become increasingly installation-based, using the gallery spaces or unusual locations to create vertiginous environments charged with politics and history. Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002) was a commemoration of the seventeenth anniversary of the violent seizing of the Supreme Court, Bogotá on 6 and 7 November, 1985. Salcedo sited the work in the new Palace of Justice where, over the course of 53 hours (the duration of the siege), wooden chairs were slowly lowered against the façade of the building from different points on its roof, creating "an act of memory" in order to re-inhabit this space of forgetting. " (White Cube)

Salcedo is the creator of Shibboleth, the 167 metre-long crack in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern Gallery in London. Of the work, completed in 2007, she says it "represents borders, the experience of immigration, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World Person coming into the heart of Europe." (wikipedia)

Sources:
www.whitecube.com
www.dareonline.org
wikipedia: Doris Salcedo