A seat in Turbine Hall for Colombian artist

She has responded to the social and political problems of her South American homeland with architectural works on an increasingly large scale. And now the British public will see how Doris Salcedo reacts to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London.

Salcedo, who was born in 1958 in Bogota, Colombia, was named yesterday as the eighth artist to take on the challenge of filling the cathedral-like entrance hall with a work of art.

Achim Borchardt-Hume, the Tate curator who will oversee the commission, said she was an entirely suitable choice. "Since about 2001 her practice seems to have transferred more and more into the public sphere. That seemed to be intriguing, given that the Turbine Hall is such an important public space," he said.

"And when one looks at her large-scale projects, they show a great skill and great ability to engage with architectural space. Again that is a big challenge for the Turbine Hall."

Salcedo trained as a painter but then began making sculptures from ordinary household objects worn by age, such as chairs, tables and wardrobes, but juxtaposing them with other, less orthodox relics of domestic life, such as human hair, cement and clothes.

Attracted to the pain felt by victims of violence and injustice, and absorbed by the widespread experience of loss in Colombia, she progressed to larger-scale works, often based on meticulous research.

For years, she has kept files on concentration camps, as well as contemporary versions where civilians are held without trial. "Every time I'm working, I have a thinker guiding me," she said at the time of her last show in Britain. Describing herself as "a political person," she "sees everything from the vantage of the Third World".

In 2002, over the course of two days, she lowered 280 chairs down the facade of the Palace of Justice in Bogota, where she lives, to pay homage to those killed in a failed coup 17 years earlier. It was described as the first time Colombia had been publicly confronted with memories of this event.

A year later, for the Istanbul Biennial, she filled a derelict building plot with 1,550 chairs piled house-high, in a work designed to evoke the migrants who underpin the global economy.

For her most recent show in London, at White Cube in 2004, Salcedo embedded wire mesh into what appeared to be the gallery walls, to create a suggestion of being trapped in a confined space.

The Tate, which showed some of her work in 1999, has increased its holdings of Latin American artists and owns three works by Salcedo, a relatively high number given she is not prolific.

Mr Borchardt-Hume said every artist who accepted the commission learnt how challenging a space it was, but it did not necessarily become more difficult with time. "It's just slightly different," he said.