Politically charged art

Colombian artist Doris Salcedo will next month unveil her Unilever commission for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.

She'll be the eighth artist to face the challenge of the cavernous space and her quiet works certainly possess the power to hold court.

Though Salcedo's work never makes explicit reference to particular events, her installations address politically charged themes. Here, she has filled the main gallery with dark-wood furniture: battered wardrobes, bedsteads and chairs. Drawers and glass cabinets have been filled with concrete.

Embedded are items of clothing, dishevelled, as if frozen mid-cycle in a washing machine.

Meanwhile, chairs and wardrobes are embedded in other items of furniture, like ghosts walking through solid matter.

Upstairs, regular niches, each the size of a shoebox, have been carved out of the walls. Covered by a skin of yellow film and secured with a suture of black thread, each niche contains a pair of shoes, or occasionally a single shoe - court shoes and old-fashioned strappy ones neatly aligned.

Historically, it's a powerful, resonant image, one that is made all the more poignant by the prettiness of the display, as if they've been carefully placed by and owner who has failed to return.

Salcedo's work becomes a strange kind of memorial to history's nameless victims, and stays long in the memory.

Doris Salcedo
White Cube
Hoxton Square, N1 6PB