Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal.

In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo’s art, encouraging us to consider each work as a “theoretical object” that invites—and demands—certain kinds of considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo’s work, from Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios series—in which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia—to Shibboleth, Salcedo’s once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length of the museum hall’s concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo’s installations speak for themselves, utilizing household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time, and space in order to contend with Salcedo’s powerful sculptures and installations.

An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, Of What One Cannot Speak takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering—yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction


The Case
The World
The Book

1 Metaphoring: Singularity in Negative Space
Metaphor and Negative Space
Metaphoring Negativity
The Insistence of Metaphor
The Act of Metaphoring
Metaphor as Skin
Atrabiliarios as Political Object

2 The Politics of Anthropomorphism
The Anthropomorphic Imagination
Locating Violence
House Without Spouse
Theaters of Gender
On the Move

3 Timing
Negations of Place
No More Bones
Foreshortening
Foreshortening Time

4 The Agency of Space: Installation
Listening to Time in Space
Abduction into Pain
History and the Event in the Present
New Space

5 Acts of Memory
An Act in Search of an Agent
Perception and Memory for Witnessing
Acting Memory
Meanwhile: Herenow
Active Space
Shibboleth of Past and Present

Conclusion: Political Art Takes Place
Epilogue
References
Index

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