Rate this unsettling fissure

Doris Salcedo – Shibboleth

Having never reviewed an art exhibition before this may be a learning experience for you and I. The exhibition in question is the latest in the line of Turbine Hall transformations at the Tate Modern on London’s South Bank arts complex. The hall itself is a gargantuan space of which a handful of prominent artists have had almost free reign over how they choose to fill it, Olafur Eliasson magnificently chose to create an artificial sunrise, Bruce Nauman had a disturbing soundscape of disparate vocal tracks and perhaps more famously the hall played host to a series of tube slides in a piece by Carsten Holler.

The new inhabitant of this daunting workspace is a fissure in the floor, the crack runs from the top of the sloping entrance right up to the glass wall on the far side. It’s a remarkable sight and very well executed as you can’t help but feel slightly unsettled walking further down this snaking line in the floor which only opens wider still. The name of this piece means a word or phrase, which upon being pronounced, indicates (or at least gives a clue to) the origin of the speaker. The guide at the Tate helpfully points out this may be interpreted as an unearthing of history, a dark history at that. For me this makes a great deal of sense, I can understand having a visible structural weakness in a space such as the Turbine Hall reminds us what we build on, how the modern world is constructed on, and indeed using, what was there before. Salcedo has succeeded in making something incredibly thought-provoking. When I was there everyone was taking pictures of this crack in the floor, practically every six feet along the way another picture was snapped (I can’t really say I disapprove, I was entirely guilty of this myself). The fact that everyone was so eager in capturing the piece was intriguing, it seems like an odd thing to want to get so close to. Do we really love seeing this kind of potential impending destruction or is it simply because you don’t see stuff like this every day? I have neither the energy or academic background to call that one, all I can say is that there did seem to be a lot of people taking photos at this exhibition, I’m not too sure what to make of that.

Rated: 4 out of 7