Doris Salcedo speaks about her Sharjah Biennial 15 Prize-winning work.

‘Uprooted’ (2020–2022) is a large-scale installation consisting 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.

Known for her sociopolitical sculptural approach, Salcedo centres her multidisciplinary practice around themes of memory, loss and violence as experienced by the exiled and traumatised. Her work draws on her own upbringing during a period of political instability in Colombia.