Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 1987. © Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo Untitled 1987. © Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth II  2007

Shibboleth II 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 III (Tate P20336) 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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artworks in Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth IV  2007

Shibboleth IV 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 III (Tate P20336), 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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artworks in Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo, Untitled  1987

Shortly after returning to her native Bogotà from New York in the mid-1980s, Salcedo created a series of sculptures made from discarded pieces of furniture such as the bedsteads used here. These objects conjure up ideas of protection, care and confinement. Broken and dysfunctional, the beds have been tied together with animal fibre in what appears to be a repair doomed from the outset to failure. The result is a construction whose fragility becomes a poetic metaphor for the human condition.

Gallery label, July 2007

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artworks in Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo, Untitled  1986–7

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artworks in Doris Salcedo

Art in this room

P20335: Shibboleth II
Doris Salcedo Shibboleth II 2007
P20337: Shibboleth IV
Doris Salcedo Shibboleth IV 2007
T07836: Untitled
Doris Salcedo Untitled 1987
T14805: Untitled
Doris Salcedo Untitled 1986–7