Dimensions: image: 640 x 470 mm
Copyright: © Doris Salcedo | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Doris Salcedo, born in 1958, created "Shibboleth III" for the Tate Modern. Editor: It's unsettling! A long, jagged crack runs through the floor, disrupting the gallery's smooth surface. Curator: Indeed, it's a profound intervention. Salcedo uses the gallery itself as a loaded material, addressing issues of displacement and the experience of immigrants. Editor: The crack, in its raw physicality, makes me consider the labor required. How was this rent created? What tools, what techniques, allowed such a rupture? Curator: Consider Tate Modern's own history; it’s a former power station. The institutional context amplifies the work’s symbolic weight, a fissure in the very foundation of a major art institution. Editor: Absolutely. The gallery space becomes a site of social commentary, making visible the invisible wounds inflicted by power structures. Curator: A powerful statement. The transformation of such an established space is in itself a social gesture. Editor: Agreed. I'm left wondering about the gallery’s role, its ongoing transformation and the implications behind such powerful statements within institutional walls.
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Shibboleth III is a medium-size digital photograph by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo that depicts the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, with a long narrow crack running along its floor. The print is part of a portfolio of four photographs each showing different views of the same scene, including Shibboleth I (Tate P20334), Shibboleth II (Tate P20335) and Shibboleth IV (Tate P20337), and the portfolio as a whole is number one in an edition of forty-five plus ten artist’s proofs. The photographs were made as part of Salcedo’s 2007 installation project for the Unilever Series at Tate Modern, also titled Shibboleth, which involved the artist creating a deep fissure in the floor of the Turbine Hall that stretched from one end of the gallery to the other, into which she placed a concrete cast of a Colombian rock face with a wire chain-link fence set into it. These photographs are digital composites made up of images of the Turbine Hall seen from four different angles and photographs that Salcedo took of a small-scale model of the cracked floor that she made in her studio in Bogotá, Colombia.
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