Doris Salcedo "Shibboleth"

"Shibboleth" Doris Salcedo


Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.

Text by Martin Herbert
The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo

Shibboleth, a large installation piece by Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo. Salcedo’s works are intense, unsettling and deeply thought provoking as is the war torn country where she is from. Shibboleth is a massive piece about people who have been exposed to the extremes of racial hatred in the “first world”. Her other sculptures share a similar theme, yet not as profound as Shibboleth. Shibboleth is Salcedo’s most recent and certainly the most remarkable of her works. It is a crack that runs the vast length of floor within the confines of the great Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
A "shibboleth", according to the Oxford Dictionary, is ‘a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation; a word or sound very difficult for foreigners to pronounce correctly.’ There is an incident in the Bible which references the word ‘shibboleth’; in The Book of Judges, Ephraimites, attempting to flee across the river Jordan, were stopped by their enemies, the Gileadites. The Epraimites did not have a ‘sh’ sound in their dialect and those who could not say the word ‘shibboleth’ were captured and executed. A shibboleth can be thought of as a token of power: the power to judge, refuse and kill.
In Salcedo’s interview, she states that Shibboleth is about people who have experienced extreme experiences of racial hatred and their experience is hidden in the division created by the crack. She wanted a piece that intruded into the space, that it is unwelcome, like an immigrant. She did not intend Shibboleth to be viewed as an attack, but rather a reminder, a question, a disruption, “not only in the space but also in time….” By digging beneath the surface, Salcedo is reconnecting the building to colonial and postcolonial histories, to power, and to the creation of a grave truth: difference, otherness and the vast gap created by exclusions. She states that the “ideal of humanity [is] so restrictedly defined that it excluded non-European peoples from the human genre,” in which “the excluded have no hope of answering correctly.”