‘When you see the reaction of the public to the Turbine Hall, they are amazed by the space. It’s extraordinary when you think of the level of difficulty of, say, the pyramids – it’s a straight-forward, industrial building. I think it’s a narcissistic reaction. People are thinking of the power and of what it represents – people are always looking up.’ With a wry look, Doris Salcedo describes her plans for the latest installation at the Tate Modern. The Columbian artist is standing among works made over the last 10 years at the White Cube Gallery, timed to prefigure her major installation at Bankside. The latest large-scale project in the Unilever series is a new intervention that, for the past six months, has functioned as a labyrinth of Carsten Höller’s metallic slides.

Like Höller’s Test Site, Salcedo’s installation will be about shifting the perspective of the visitor, taking the gaze away from lofty heights. But there the similarity ends. Salcedo is a political artist whose work is informed by imbalances of power within her country and between nations, and by the trauma and dislocation experienced in the private sphere by political repression. ‘I will be taking on the history of the building in terms of it being a modernist structure created in 1947,’ she says. ‘It was a time when Britain was letting go of many of its colonies, and so it is incredibly charged with history.’ The ebb of power is inextricably and ironically linked to the Tate, with the original Tate Gallery founded in 1897 from the fortune made by Henry Tate in the sugar trade. She adds: ‘It is a museum for western art. What does it mean for me to be here as a Third World artist?’

Salcedo’s retrospective at the White Cube gives us some idea of what to expect. Solid wooden furniture is locked together, made tomb-like with cement, smoothed over, leaving just the ghostly traces of clothing – lace, buttons, cuffs. Such works are chilling, clearly representing a political force which annihilates humanity and personal stories. In recent years, however, Salcedo has largely moved out of the gallery to reposition her art outside, between and upon architectural spaces. In 2002 in her home town of Bogota, she gradually lowered 280 chairs over 55 hours onto the new Palace of Justice. At the supreme court on 6 and 7 November, 1985, leftist rebels laid siege to the courts, but the short-lived coup was violently put down by government troops, leaving 100 dead. The 55-hour period corresponded to the time of the struggle, commemorating those who died in battle.
She returned to the same scale later in her career. In 2003 at the Istanbul International Biennial, Salcedo stacked 1,550 chairs into an empty space with legs, arms and backs all intricately interlocking; holding themselves rigid in precarious but solid tension (seen above). For her work in the Tate, curator Achim Borchardt-Hume says, ‘The piece is completely tied to the space physically and conceptually – to the grandeur and history and what it is now. It will be quite a challenging work. It questions the history of museums and how they tie into a wider understanding of who we are now.’

Unlike Höller’s slides, there will be no easy ride. The work will take time to negotiate. To create a large-scale installation for Tate Modern is a culmination of Salcedo’s previous work – bringing the grand scale into a gallery setting that has a fading power base as its context. There is a fascinating blend of concerns here. Although it’s a narcissistic take – to assume it all comes together under our ex-power-station-cum-gallery roof – perhaps that’s just the sort of thinking Salcedo will be rearranging.
Doris Salcedo’s contribution to the Unilever series runs at the Tate Modern until 6 April 2008