Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics\nof memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations\nin dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates\nbetween the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly\nreimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking\nfigures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo,\nmeet Mieke Bal. In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into\nintimate encounters with Salcedo’s art, encouraging us to consider\neach work as a “theoretical object” that invites-and\ndemands-certain kinds of considerations about history, death,\nerasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo’s work, from\nSalcedo’s Atrabiliarios series-in which the artist uses worn shoes\nto retrace los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) from nations like\nArgentina, Chile, and Colombia-to Shibboleth, Salcedo’s\nonce-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she\ncreated a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length\nof the museum hall’s concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo’s\ninstallations speak for themselves, utilizing household items,\nhuman bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent\nspaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out\neven deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of\npolitical art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor,\ntime, and space in order to contend with Salcedo’s powerful\nsculptures and installations. An unforgettable fusion of art and\nessay, Of What One Cannot Speak takes us to the very core of events\nwe are capable of remembering-yet still uncomfortably cannot speak\naloud.

\n\n