Uprooted. 2020–2022
804 dead trees and steel
650 x 3000 x 500 cm
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation, with the generous support of Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

Known for her sociopolitical sculptural work, Doris Salcedo’s multidisciplinary practice centres around themes of memory, loss and violence as experienced by the exiled and traumatised. The largescale mixed media installation, Uprooted (2020–2022) consists of 804 dead trees that are sculpted and assembled to depict a house. Structurally uninhabitable, the work symbolises the refugee’s predicament—a seemingly permanent state of impermanence—and draws from the artist’s long-term research on forms of violence experienced by migrants, displaced persons and refugees. Attributing the cause of this forced movement of people to the capitalist destruction of the environment, Salcedo positions Uprooted as a site of extreme contradiction—at once immoveable and rootless, violent and passive.
(Text at the exhibition. © Sharjah Art Foundation)

Doris Salcedo is one of the three winners of the Sharjah Biennial 15 Prize.