BASEL.- This autumn and winter, the Fondation Beyeler is showing the large-scale installation Palimpsest by internationally renowned Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b. 1958). Through her objects, sculptures and large site-specific interventions Salcedo addresses the impact of violence and exclusion in her native Colombia and across other regions in the world. Palimpsest focusses on the fate of refugees and migrants who have drowned in the Mediterranean or Atlantic over the past twenty years attempting to emigrate from their countries of origin in search of a better life in Europe. Palimpsest will be on display at the Fondation Beyeler until September 2023, culminating in a large-scale exhibition by the artist in summer 2023.

Based on many years of research, Doris Salcedo repeatedly sets out to explore situations of conflict in which violence and its victims are omnipresent. The artist directs her attention to the ever-repeating cycle of acts of violence, outrage, remembrance and forgetting. Her works often take on a sinister quality, evoking the absence of people – missing persons, refugees, people who have been murdered or forgotten. Poetic and fragile in equal measure, Salcedo’s work encompasses the memory of people who die forgotten, and is a homage to the mourning of the living.

Between 2013 and 2017, more than 15,600 refugees and migrants lost their lives off the coasts of Greece, Italy and Spain as they made their way from North Africa, the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. For almost five years, the artist followed the international media coverage and spoke with survivors and relatives of the victims. The harrowing stories and fates, and the far-reaching consequences of each death for relatives and friends, prompted her to create Palimpsest, a work recording the names of over 300 refugees and migrants who died at sea.




The title of the exhibition project derives from the ancient Greek word “palimpsest”, which refers to manuscript pages that were inscribed, cleaned and rewritten several times through the course of antiquity and the Middle Ages. The traces of the original sentences remained partly visible under the new script, which made the transmission of the old texts possible in the first place. Doris Salcedo’s Palimpsest is a walk-through installation of sand-coloured, porous floor tiles. The work consists of two overlapping cycles of names: the names of those who died during a migrant movement prior to 2010 are offset by fine sand and embedded in the stone slabs; the names of those who died between 2011 and 2016 appear on top as drops of water that join together to form letters, which then seep away again, in a constant cycle of inscription and erasure. At the Fondation Beyeler, Palimpsest will be installed in the museum’s largest gallery and will comprise 66 stone slabs, laid on a floor area of around 400 square meters, on which visitors will be able to read 171 of the altogether 300 names.

The work addresses the inability to collectively mourn and questions how remembering is taking place in societies that are skilled at forgetting and where each new tragedy erases awareness of the previous one. The installation reflects Salcedo’s ongoing preoccupation with the relationship between personal suffering and the public space. Palimpsest is therefore also intended as a place of encounter and grief. Salcedo’s modes of representation evoke universal feelings of empathy, grief and loss in the viewer—a timeless, cross-cultural experience. The sense of responsibility that Salcedo addresses in the face of political injustices becomes an imperative in her works, giving them a monumental appearance. Although her work often refers to actual events, it is open to personal interpretation and assumes a universal validity and potency.

Doris Salcedo ranks among the most important artists of our time. She was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, where she still lives and works today. Salcedo studied painting and art history at the University of Bogotá, then sculpture in the early 1980s at New York University. In 1985 the artist returned to Colombia, where during numerous trips around the country she met survivors and relatives of victims of brutal violence. Her resulting awareness of the themes of war, alienation, disorientation and loss of home has formed the basis of her work ever since.

Salcedo drew attention especially with her large-scale installations such as Untitled, 2003, Shibboleth, 2007, and Plegaria Muda, 2008–2010. Untitled, 2003, produced for the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, consisted of about 1550 wooden chairs stacked between two buildings to address the history of migration and displacement in Istanbul. For Shibboleth, 2007, at Tate Modern, London, she created a long snaking fissure that ran the vast length of the Turbine Hall, as if striking to the very foundations of the museum, allowing borders, exclusion and separation to be experienced in spatial terms. With its coffin-like pairs of tables sprouting delicate blades of grass, Plegaria Muda, 2008–2010, evokes a freshly laid-out cemetery, and symbolically commemorates the thousands of civilians who have disappeared and presumably been killed in Colombia in recent years. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented the artist's first retrospective in 2015. This year, a solo exhibition is dedicated to her in Glenstone, Maryland. In 2014 Doris Salcedo was represented in a collection presentation at the Fondation Beyeler with works from the Daros Latinamerica Collection. Palimpsest was first shown in 2017 at the Palacio de Cristal by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and subsequently at White Cube in London. The remarkable installation is now presented for the first time to a German-speaking audience and is shown in parallel with the major exhibition of the Beyeler Collection celebrating the Fondation Beyeler’s 25th anniversary. In 2023 Fondation Beyeler will dedicate a comprehensive exhibition to Doris Salcedo, presenting major work from across her oeuvre.