At some time during last July, visitors to Tate Modern may have noticed a Latin American woman in her late forties hanging around in the Turbine Hall. Every day for more than a week she would arrive in the morning and settle in for the day, loitering with intent, watching other visitors and their reactions to their surroundings, examining the contours of the building, assessing the feel and architectural language of that vast, iconic space.

The woman was Doris Salcedo, one of the leading sculptors of her generation. Her name is not widely known in this country, but it soon will be because Salcedo has been chosen to create the next installation for the Turbine Hall, which will be unveiled on October 9.

The Turbine Hall is, as the Tate curator Achim Bor-chardt-Hume readily admits, a tricky space to work with. “It’s an extraordinary architectural space. It’s really a complicated beast in terms of scale, and also in terms of the questions of how public it is, whether it is actually a part of a museum or whether it is a sort of covered street, as it was initially conceived. Doris has been considering how all these things come together, and her work will be very much conceived in response to this space.”

Salcedo, who was born in Bogotá in 1958, rooted much of her early work to the history of violence in her native Colombia. With painstaking attention to detail, she produced raw, dark and cluttered installations, such as the one outside the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in which she lowered 280 chairs down the façade to pay homage to those killed there in a failed guerrilla coup 17 years earlier.

The following year, as part of the Istanbul Biennial, 2003, she filled a derelict building plot in the city with 1,550 chairs, piled as high as the neighbouring houses, but flush with their façades, evoking the masses of faceless migrants who underpin our globalised economy.

In the past four years the scope and subject matter of her work has broadened. “While she used to concentrate on relatively small-scale gallery pieces, often involving furniture, she has recently moved on to larger scale public commissions. And she has become particularly good at engaging with architecture,” says Borchardt-Hume.

Undoubtedly Salcedo is an overtly political person; perhaps her origins demand a high degree of political engagement. But the issues she deals with today are in no way confined to a particular place. Subjects and locations are not identified: although the world is awash with different varieties of refugees, terrorism and illness, it is possible to apply one’s own concerns to her work.

In 2004 at White Cube in London she embedded wire mesh into false plaster walls, creating the sensation of being trapped in a cage. The feeling of suppressed violence was palpable. And if you want to preview examples of her work, the Tate is hastily bringing three of her pieces out of storage and putting them on display next week.

They are works from the late 1980s, involving furni- ture. One consists of two bedsteads tied together with animal intestines (one of the more exciting challenges to the Tate conservation department). A second shows two halved tables connected with concrete into which human hair has been woven. And the third is a wardrobe filled with concrete in which a chair has been embedded.

Odd as they sound, Borchardt-Hume says that they grow in complexity the longer you look at them. “At first they seem like something very familiar, but after a while you get a sense of some extreme act of violence. They have the effect of jarring your preconceived notions.”

Whatever she unveils in October, it is bound to confront real-world horrors in some form. The question is: will the audience respond with a sense of social responsibility or will it merely pay lip service to compassion while hotly pursuing the sort of fashionable aesthetics that the Tate peddles so well?

Doris Salcedo, Unilever Series 2007, will be in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern from October 9 until March 24

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