[1] Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia and is generally composed of commonplace items such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, and rose petals.

[2] Salcedo's work gives form to pain, trauma, and loss, while creating space for individual and collective mourning.

She is married to Colombian novelist and sociologist Azriel Bibliowicz, whose work investigates the Jewish experience in Colombia.

In pieces such as Unland: The Orphan's Tunic from 1997 and the La Casa Viuda series from the early 1990s, Salcedo takes ordinary household items, such as a chair and table, and transforms them into memorials for victims of the Civil War in Colombia.

[4] In his book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen dedicates a chapter to Salcedo and Unland: The Orphan's Tunic, presenting her work as “Memory Sculpture.” Huyssen offers a detailed description of the piece, a seemingly mundane table that, when considered closely, “captures the viewer's imagination in its unexpected, haunting visual and material presence.”[5] A seemingly everyday piece of furniture is in fact made of two destroyed tables joined and covered with a whitish veil of fabric, presumably the orphan's original tunic.

[4] During a conversation with Carlos Basualdo, Salcedo discusses her own approach to producing art: “The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful.

Change takes place, as if the experience of the victim were reaching out…The sculpture presents the experience as something present- a reality that resounds within the silence of each human being that gazes upon it.”[7] Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, through these contemporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time.

Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002) is a work commemorating the seventeenth anniversary of the violent seizing of the Supreme Court in Bogotá on November 6 and 7, 1985.

It took her over the course of 53 hours (the duration of the original siege) to place wooden chairs against the façade of the building being lowered from different points on its roof.

[9] In 2005, at the Castello di Rivoli, Salcedo reworked one of the institution's major rooms by extending the existing vaulted brick ceiling of the gallery.

[4] Salcedo is quoted saying "seeing these 1,550 wooden chairs piled high between two buildings in central Istanbul, I'm reminded of mass graves.

I'm just addressing experiences.” In 2007, four years after Salcedo's installation in Istanbul, another artist, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, used chairs to create a memory effect in his piece Fairytale.

In her piece old shoes, in pairs and singles, are encased behind sheets of translucent animal skin inside alcoves or niches in the gallery wall.

Salcedo is seeking not only to express the horror of violence but also to investigate the way people prevail in times of torture, repairing their physical and psychological wounds, as well as raising resistance and remembering those who are missing.

Rather than fill Turbine Hall with an installation, she opened up a subterranean wound in the floor that stretched the entire length of the former power station.

The concrete walls of the crevice were ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between elements that resisted each other and at the same time depended on one another.

[25] Salcedo created the piece in 2013, working with rose petals and thread as her materials; A Flor de Piel was acquired by the Harvard Art Museums in 2014.

[25] Plegaria Muda is a series of sculptures, each composed of two hand-crafted tables, which are approximately the same shape and size of a coffin.

[26] Since 1988 Salcedo has interviewed people whose relatives have been "disappeared" by presumably order of the military associated with Colombia's civil war and illegal drug trade.

I have come to the conclusion that the industrial prison system in the United States has many of these elements, where people, for really no reason, for possession of marijuana or things like that are going to jail, where some minor crimes have become felonies.

The idea of having a large portion of the population excluded from civil rights, from many, many possibilities, implies that you have people that can almost be considered socially dead.