Doris Salcedo – Hiroshima Art Prize

19.07 – 13.10 / 2014
Hiroshima MOCA, Hiroshima
Winner of the 9th Hiroshima Art Prize Decided Ms. Doris Salcedo

The City of Hiroshima has selected the winner of the 9th Hiroshima Art Prize, Ms. Doris Salcedo (born 1958 in Bogota, Colombia, where she currently resides)

About the Hiroshima Art Prize
Established by the City of Hiroshima in 1989, the Hiroshima Art Prize recognizes the achievements of artists who have contributed to the peace of humanity in the field of contemporary art, and through contemporary art aims to appeal to a wider world and the spread the “Spirit of Hiroshima,” which seeks everlasting world peace.This prize is awarded once every three years.

Doris Salcedo is an artist who has consistently expressed her view that art has the potential power of strong resistance to the widespread violence and discrimination in the world, especially in her native land of Colombia.
From the early 1990s, Ms. Salcedo participated in international art exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, and received international critical praise for her works which quietly evoke the memory of victims of violence using everyday household furniture and clothes and restoring them through sculpture, in addition to her large-scale installations which completely transform spaces into places of mourning for the dead.
She received further praise in 2007 for her installation at the Tate Modern in London, which consisted of a 167 meter-long fissure in the floor.

Ms. Salcedo has created works that are concerned with the victims of violence, transcend mourning death, incorporating the hope of rebirth. Her exhibition using original methods to appeal to the viewer and highlight in a modern context the tragedy of the violence of Hiroshima, unprecedented in human history, is eagerly anticipated. Therefore, the judges feel her work is consistent with the aims of the Hiroshima Art Prize.

The Hiroshima Art Prize Award Ceremony will be held around July 2014, and from the summer to the autumn the Hiroshima Art Prize Commemorative Exhibition featuring Ms. Salcedo’s work will be held at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.