The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo
Shibboleth

With Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo has opened a long, snaking crack across the vast length of the Turbine Hall. Fracturing the concrete floor, her new work strikes to the very foundations of the museum. 

Something similar might be said of the concept that underpins Salcedo’s work at Tate Modern. A shibboleth, according to the Oxford English 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.’ It is, therefore, a way of separating one people from another. The word refers back to an incident in the Bible. The Book of Judges describes how the Ephraimites, attempting to flee across the river Jordan, were stopped by their enemies, the Gileadites. As their dialect did not include a ‘sh’ sound, those who could not say the word ‘shibboleth’ were captured and executed. A shibboleth is a token of power: the power to judge, refuse and kill. What might it mean, however, to refer to such violence in a museum of modern art?

First, and most obviously, the contemplative nature of such a venue allows the gesture to resonate in its widest sense. Walking down Salcedo’s incised line, particularly if you know about her previous work, might well prompt a broader consideration of power’s divisive operations as encoded in the brutal narratives of colonialism, their unhappy aftermaths in postcolonial nations, and in the stand off between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres.

If Shibboleth speaks openly to our moment, it is also concerned with an archaeological sense of history. Indeed, Salcedo infers that the two are fundamentally connected. Look down into the crack, and you see not Tate Modern’s foundation but a carefully constructed concrete cast formation, embedded with chain-link wire fence. For Salcedo, the crack reveals a ‘colonial and imperial history [that] has been disregarded, marginalised or simply obliterated… the history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity and… its untold dark side.’

Tate Modern, of course, is housed in a former power station, one commissioned in 1947 to assist in the powering and reconstruction of post-war London. This was the very moment that the city was becoming increasingly multicultural as a result of labour-migration movements in the decolonising twilight of the British Empire, and the schisms and exclusions of postcolonialism were already beginning to be played out. Bankside Power Station was established alongside the welfare state, which itself was designed to assist in creating multiracial harmony. After being decommissioned in 1981 by the Conservative government, it sat derelict until reopening as an art gallery in 2000. Digging beneath the surface, Salcedo reconnects the building to these colonial and postcolonial histories, to the operations of power and the ideological creation of artificial notions of difference and otherness.

Modernity, as embodied by Tate Modern’s collection of modern art, is implicated too. ‘Modernity,’ writes Salcedo, “is seen as an exclusively European event in which the self-cultivation of the human mind through the exercise of reason and the study of the classics had as its main purpose the creation of a homogenous, rational and beautiful society.’ Modern art, through its advocacy of what Salcedo calls ‘an ideal of humanity so restrictedly defined that it excluded non-European peoples from the human genre,’ can be said to have perpetuated a potent stereotype or separation: a shibboleth of its own, which the excluded have no hope of answering correctly.

Through Shibboleth, these phantasmal pressures comprise an ineradicable fault line: one that now, it appears, is causing the building to be seismically sundered. Gouging open the very ground that we walk on, Salcedo reminds us that these wounds can not be simply consigned to the past. She encourages us to confront discomforting truths about our world and about ourselves with absolute candidness and without self-deception.

Text by Martin Herbert

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia. She studied Fine Art at the University of Bogotá and New York University. Her exhibitions include New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 1998, XXIV Sao Paolo Biennal in 1998, Tate Gallery in 1999, SF MOMA in 1999 and 2005, Camden Arts Centre in 2001 and 8th International Istanbul Biennal in 2003. She lives and works in Bogotá.