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Tate Modern Exhibition

The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth

9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008
Exhibition banner for Doris Salcedo Shibboleth for the Unilever Series at Tate Modern

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.

In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.

In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself. Her work encourages us to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, and without self-deception.

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, where she lives and works.

28291797001

TateShots: Doris Salcedo

Tate Modern

Bankside
London SE1 9TG
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Dates

9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008

Sponsored by

The Unilever Series: an annual art commission

The Unilever Series: an annual art commission

Find out more

  • Art Now: Doris Salcedo

    Unland is a series of three recent sculptures by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Tate Britian past exhibition

  • The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo

    The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo: Press related to past event.

  • Unland: The Place of Testimony

    Tanya Barson

    Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (born 1958) addresses the themes of loss and bereavement in her sculpture Unland: audible in the mouth, 1998. Focusing on this work in Tate's collection, the paper looks at the position of witnesses to violent events and how their testimonies are translated by Salcedo into the formal language of sculpture.

  • Doris Salcedo Detail of Atrabiliarios 1992–2004

    Voice of the invisible

    Madeleine Grynsztejn

    The social, historical and political landscape of Colombia and beyond has deeply informed the work of the artist who is creating the next Unilever Series commission for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

  • Artist

    Doris Salcedo

    born 1958
Artwork
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