Doris Salcedo transforms displacement into form at White Cube

Doris Salcedo’s forthcoming exhibition at White Cube New York presents two new bodies of work that confront profound themes of loss, belonging and the violence of displacement through materials of extraordinary tenderness and specificity.

At the exhibition’s centre stands ‘House’ (2023 to 26), a monumental yet ethereal structure fabricated entirely from human hair. The work emerges as something between architecture and elegy, a dwelling rendered fragile and luminous through its composition. Hair, a material that carries the weight of individual identity and collective memory, becomes here the substance of shelter itself: both what protects us and what marks us as human.

Alongside this is ‘Grains of Sorrow’, an installation comprising 47 vessels crafted exclusively from rice and human hair. Each carefully constructed form functions as a counter narrative to the dehumanisation wrought by man made starvation. Rice, fundamental to sustenance across continents, and hair, the most personal of materials, merge into objects that speak to dignity, to nourishment denied, to the basic human need to be seen and cared for.

Salcedo’s practice has long engaged with the architecture of violence and its aftermath, transforming trauma into form with a precision that feels almost archaeological. In this exhibition, the ordinary becomes extraordinary: the everyday materials of the body and the table become vessels for collective grief and resistance. The work moves quietly but with absolute conviction, demanding that we reckon with what displacement means, with who bears its cost, and with what it means to construct home when home has been taken.

The exhibition runs from 13 November 2026 to 16 January 2027 at White Cube’s New York location.

Imagery courtesy of White Cube (@whitecube).