Text by Andreas Huyssen, Doris Salcedo and an in conversation with Tim Marlow
Edited by Honey Luard
Designed by Mathias Clottu
285 x 225 mm, hardback
72 pages, 27 colour illustrations
ISBN 978-1-910844-31-1
Published by White Cube, 2018

Published to mark Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s memorable exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, this book is a record of one of her most ambitious and resonant works to date, in which she created an installation in remembrance of those who have lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

Featuring the large-scale installation Palimpsest, first shown at Palacio de Cristal in Madrid in 2017, the exhibition reflects Salcedo’s continued focus on the experience of mourning and the connection between violence, anonymity and public space.

The publication includes a considered, poetic and informative essay by Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York, Andreas Huyssen. ‘This is the palimpsest of memory itself,’ he writes, ‘embodying the temporality of writing and erasing, the temporality of memory and forgetting, the temporality of intense and subsiding grief, even the temporality of the event of death itself.’ Alongside this essay, Salcedo is in conversation with Tim Marlow, (at the time) Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, addressing the impetus and journey that she embarked on in order to produce the work.

The second part of the book is devoted to Salcedo’s most recent sculptures, ‘Tabula Rasa’, a series of domestic tables that the artist shattered and rebuilt, splinter by splinter, as a means to express the experience of victims of sexual violence. ‘Tabula Rasa exposes the pain that is hidden, the inside is exposed and its vulnerability becomes part of the outside,’ the artist says.

Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York. 

A writer, broadcaster and art historian, Tim Marlow is Director and Chief Executive of the Design Museum, London. Previously he was Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.