On this occasion,
I visited the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) on its website, where I found a few online exhibitions. From the art collection HERland, I
encounter Doris Salcedo, a Colombian artist with her artwork known as “Shibboleth”.
The MOLAA has a gallery that consists of four digital photographs from different
perspectives, illustrating Salcedo’s installation piece created in the Turbine
Hall at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, England. According to MOLAA’s
website, this piece of art is basically a 167 meter-long fracture made on the hall floor and
its purpose is “disrupting the room violently and forcing visitors to monitor
their movement around it”, either to get through it or to prevent tripping. Shibboleth is an austere intervention, imperceptible at first glance, however, it transformed the colossal space of the old Turbine Hall. But
what is the meaning of this long crack on the Gallery’s floor, which seems to
make no sense? Well, it actually has a deep significance because “the gap in
the floor invites inspection, encouraging the viewer to imagine their life from
the perspective of outsiders like undocumented migrants, forced to live their
lives along the margins and through unofficial structures” (MOLAA).
I was lucky
to find an article that talks about Salcedo's work of art, titled "Absenceand Pain in the Work of Doris Salcedo and Rosemberg Sandoval", written by Gaston
Alzate and translated by Marcia Olander. As the title indicates, the text analyses
the art of two Colombian artists. As stated by Alzate, "the breach is envisioned as a giant scar between rich and poor nations,
an incarnation of the irremediable distance between the two" (10).The crack is for the pavement, what a scar is for the body: a witness of a tragedy, of a memory. The Shibbolet art piece is a metaphor that incorporates many contemporary concepts like racism, social order or exploitation; but it is also an art and museum criticism. From the perspective of Alzate, Salcedo's work intrudes upon and thus questions this space, it plays with the spectator's curiosity, becoming thin or thick in places leaving the metalic structure and steel are visible, which the author interprets as "visually alluding to fences and crossings along today's borders, and to detention camps" (11).
Something worth noting is that after a while, this fracture in the concrete was sealed, but it "remains under the floor of the hall, marking the institution with a 'permanent scar', like the historical marks left on our history by colonialism, slavery and segregation" (MOLAA).
Where does the name "Shibbolet" come from?
The Hebrew word Shibbolet means 'grain stalk'. The title refers to a passage from the Old Testament of the Bible, in which a tribe identified each other when they enunciated that word, so the difficulty in pronouncing it correctly became a sign of belonging to a community, a "gap between life and death" (Alzate 10) since the strangers were captured and killed. Considering that, the Shibboleth photographs and installation "could be seen as a symbol of the damage caused by cultural and geographical exclusion" (White).
Sharing my thoughts...
Overall, the article adequately dealt with all the ideas and the main concept of Salcedo's work: the Shibboleth. I am impressed that the work also intersected with the theme of religion because of the meaning of the word and its interpretation. Personally, I really enjoyed analyzing this work of art since I am a huge fan of architecture and, the act of conceptualizing a design is something essential that gives meaning to what we see, touch, feel and hear. Even being a simple artwork, Shibboleth has a deepper meaning: the crack is for the pavement, what a scar is for the body: a witness of a tragedy, of a memory, of a feeling...
Something worth noting is that after a while, this fracture in the concrete was sealed, but it "remains under the floor of the hall, marking the institution with a 'permanent scar', like the historical marks left on our history by colonialism, slavery, and segregation" (MOLAA).
Before you go!
Here's a short video in which the artist talks about Shibbalet in her own words...
Works Cited
Alzate,
Gastón, and Marcia Olander. “Absence
and Pain in the Work of Doris Salcedo and Rosemberg Sandoval.” South Central
Review, vol. 30, no. 3, [The South Central Modern Language Association, The
Johns Hopkins University Press], 2013, pp. 5–20,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/44016842.
MOLAA. “Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth.”
MOLAA | Museum of Latin American Art, molaa.org/salcedoshibboleth. Accessed 7 Dec. 2021.
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