Doris Salcedo's work 

Shibboleth 2007 was a long snaking fissure that ran the

vast length of the Turbine Hall, as if striking to the very foundations of the
museum. Something similar might be said of the concept that underpins the
piece.

The word 'shibboleth' refers back to an incident in the Bible, which 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 therefore a token of power: the power to judge, reject and kill.
What might it mean to refer to such violence in a museum of modern art?

For Salcedo, the crack represents a history of racism, running parallel to the
history of modernity; a standoff between rich and poor, northern and southern
hemispheres. She invites us to look down into it, and to confront discomforting
truths about our world.

TRANSCRIPTION

Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth is a piece that refers to dangers at crossing borders

or to being rejected in the moment of crossing borders. So I am making a
piece about people who have been exposed to extreme experience of racial
hatred and subjected to inhuman conditions in the first world. This piece is
trying to introduce into the Turbine Hall another perspective, and the idea is
that we all look down and maybe try to encounter the experience of these
people that I have been referring to somewhere herein within this deep
division that has been generated in the Turbine Hall. The presence of the
immigrant is always unwelcome. The presence of the immigrant is seen as
jeopardising the culture of Europe. Europe has been seen as a homogenous
society, a democratic society that has learned, through centuries of
development, has learned to resolve the issues through dialogue. And if that is
the case then where do we place these outbreaks of racial hatred? So I think
that society is not so homogenous and is not so democratic and there is some
people that are experiencing that. So wherever the world the earth opened…
in the first world there is mesh keeping people out or inside as you want to see
it, anyway keeping people away so it’s a piece that is both in the epicentre of
catastrophe and at the same time it is outside catastrophe. As you look in you
can get the feeling of catastrophe in there but nonetheless outside is quite
subtle and I wanted a piece that intrudes in the space, that it is unwelcome like
an immigrant that just intrudes without permission, just gets in slowly and all of
a sudden it’s there and it’s a fairly big presence. I believe every work of art is
political because every work of art is breaking new ground and it’s in a way
against the status quo so every work of art and the nature of art is political.
Abstract art, all of it, is political from my point of view. My work is… because of
where I come from, because I come from a country that is in the middle of a
conflict, very intense war, and I have always seen conflict and I have always
seen the world from the other perspective, from the perspective of the
defeated people not from the perspective of the triumph. It is not…I don’t see
this piece as an attack, I just think that it is a reminder. I want to bring into the
consensus of ‘everything is well, we are all happy’, I want to bring a question
mark, a disruption. Not only in the space but also in time, what is it before and
what is going to happen after? There is a quote by a philosopher Theodor
Adorno that I find amazing, he says that we should all see the world from the
perspective of the victim, like Jewish people that were killed with their head
down in the Middle Ages, so he wonders what is the perspective of the person
that is agonising in this position. So I just wanted to get that perspective. Is the
world upside down? What it is like to see the world from down there. So once
the show is over there will be… the piece will be sealed, the piece will remain
under the floor and it will be sealed so a permanent scar will always be [in] the
Turbine Hall as a memory, as a commemoration of all this life that we don’t
recognise, for us are like ghosts anyway. So in that way, that the memory of
the piece and the presence of the people that we don’t want to look at, the
presence of this life that we don’t want to acknowledge, pretty much has the
same character, just a vague memory.