Time and Rupture: Reimagining Colonial Space through Salcedo’s Shibboleth
ed. Viola Chee and Zhao Yushan
Fig. 1. Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Taken from Doris Salcedo: Exhibition Guide, p. 176.
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?
—Doris Salcedo
A crack, spanning 548 inches long across the floor of the Tate Modern, is titled Shibboleth by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. This fissure, in its sheer enormity, silently protests "the experience of the Third World person coming into the heart of Europe” (Tate). Behind the silence, words erupt, conjuring up the collective experience of Otherness among immigrants. This echoes Fanon’s provocative claim: "The Negro is not. Any more than the white man" (Bhabha 40). The caesura not only alters the rhythmic flow of the sentence by inserting an interruptive pause behind the word ‘not’, but also transforms its meaning, introducing a void at its core. It disturbs the spatial and temporal coherence of colonial modernity, confronting viewers with ghostly violence that continues to underpin contemporary national consciousness.
Shibboleth embodies unresolved tensions of colonial modernity, marked by psychic violence under the guise of a civilising mission. The Tate Modern (fig.1), a former power station, has undergone a historical transformation: from a site of hard power, marked by resource plundering and industrialisation, to a site of cultural hegemony governed by Western aesthetic standards. The crack mirrors the fractured condition of modernity, whereby progress is overshadowed by historical dislocation and racial domination. Hierarchical oppression is inscribed within the discursive structure of colonial encounters and remains irreducible from the Foucauldian mechanism of power as “apparatus” (Bhabha 74). It is etched into the scar-like formations on the uneven floor surface, testifying to the unsettling conflicts between the coloniser and the colonised subjects. Modernity gestures towards an irreparable split—where official colonial narratives are disrupted by the everyday experience of the immigrants, for whose different identities are articulated but not hierarchized, forming an in-between place of hybridity. The fissure in Shibboleth thus traces the troubling origins of modernity and foreshadows its eventual collapse, rendering history itself caught within the sculptural stasis of a single crack.
This essay begins by examining the symbol of rupture. The term "rupture", derived in part from the French rupture and Latin ruptura, carries polyphonic meanings: breaking (of objects, human limbs or skin), fragmenting, transgression, and even the reclamation of land ("Rupture, n."). By grounding the imagery of rupture within a postcolonial lens, I argue that Shibboleth exemplifies Bhabha’s theorisation of the dialectic of modernity—whereby a “splitting of the colonial space of consciousness” (43) exists, and produces “social differences” in the formation of “minority identities” (3). The rupture of Shibboleth (fig. 2) embodies the split consciousness of the nation–that is, the “articulat[ion]” (132) of “contradictory and multiple beliefs” from a minority’s perspective of past and history (134), mounted in resistance against colonial power. In doing so, it shatters the illusion of colonial modernity and progress. Furthermore, I argue that rupture complicates Bhabha’s discursive ambivalence by foregrounding bodily and affective registers within spatial dislocations. The materiality of the rupture resembles exclusionary national borders and the abyss into which immigrants fall, laying bare the brutal realities of mourning and violence endured by Colombian immigrants entering the First World. Finally and most crucially, it articulates the reparative potential latent within Bhabha’s discussion of colonial violence.
Fig. 2. A close-up shot of the surface of Shibboleth. Taken from publicdelivery.
"Rupture" as Split National Consciousness
The crack in Shibboleth stages a temporal disjunction between Colombian national memory and colonial history. Instead of the continuous, linear history of the Tate Modern, the fracture reveals the suspended strata buried beneath its surface—layers of rock buried beneath an unassuming concrete floor. Echoing Bhabha’s notion of splitting as “unearthing” of conflicting beliefs from the minority’s past, Salcedo perceives the crack as embodying an “untold dark side” (Tate Modern) that runs parallel to the history of modernity. What lies beneath is the haunting chaos of Colombia's decade-long history of internal conflict, marked by paramilitary violence, forced displacement, and unresolved mourning. The desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) signify those not only the dead, but also those displaced and forced to masquerade under another language and skin for the rest of their lives (notably, Colombians constitute the largest Latin American population in the U.S.). Shibboleth can thus be seen as a contemplative work that elevates Salcedo’s recurring themes of mourning and loss into a transcendental interrogation of historic subjecthood—between those who move through history as subjects and those whose histories are erased.
The temporal rupture experienced by Colombian migrants as they enter the First World embodies what Bhabha calls an “intimation of simultaneity across homogenous, empty time" (159). Bhabha suggests that spatial relocation during exile evokes a sense of belatedness—a temporal lag in reaching the same stage of modernity–which “destroy[s] the logic of synchronicity” (36) and reveals a “revolutionary truth” (26) for migrants. This experience of asynchronous temporality between Colombia and the First World (the latter marked by colonial modernity) produces a disjointed, affective experience for immigrants. The disjunction provokes a self-reflexive interrogation of the First World’s colonial narrative, within which Colombian identity, also migrant, post-colonial identity, is rendered unhomed and absent. This historical awareness probes the location of the present and what lies anterior to it: the past, exposing broader “historical or social tensions” that contemporary political struggles—Marxist, feminist, or others— seek to confront. This consciousness simultaneously dislodges immigrants from their immediate First World present—one still shaped by the colonial legacies of Western powers—and gestures towards a future of emancipation.
The splitting of self for the production of postcolonial consciousness, as embodied by Shibboleth, shatters the illusion of colonial progress. Once again, the evolving functions of the Tate Modern epitomise the consequences of our problematic modernity: it becomes a site of layered metaphors and metonymy—once a power station, or temple of Western art —constructed to sustain the “fixity” and “phantasmagorical quality” of colonial fantasy (Bhabha 77). In Bhabha’s terms, this culminates in a vision of colonial modernity as producing “space without places, times without duration” (142). In this vein, progress becomes void repetition fed back into the same old structure; Tate’s progress is, in fact, no progress. Salcedo calls it “the epicentre of catastrophe” (Tate). The crack ruptures colonial progress—a repetitive orchestration of “sameness”—by exposing its fragile veneer of advancement.
Salcedo further extends Bhabha’s argument to interrogate the power dynamics between the split colonial consciousness, not merely as “agonistic” (25), but as superimposable on one another. While Salcedo’s previous installations, such as A Flor De Piel, have attempted to evoke a sensation beneath the surface of the skin, she pushes the boundaries further in Shibboleth, with spatial-layering as a mode of colonial resistance. The crack’s material presence, embedded within the newly poured concrete atop the Tate’s floor, enacts a postcolonial potential to overwrite the archaic ambivalence beneath. The top layer —resembling historical awareness emerging from splitting temporality, and captured within the rupture—is now juxtaposed with, and elevated above, the museum floor, signifying the troubled foundation of colonial modernity. The superposition of double consciousness thus reveals a powerful move to resurface what is omitted and forgotten in colonial history. In this way, it also re-positions postcolonialism itself as an entirely relevant theoretical lens to re-excavate, re-interpret and re-vitalise history.
Fig. 3. Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Taken from Doris Salcedo: Exhibition Guide, p. 173.
"Rupture" as the Breaking of Human Limbs
Beyond the theoretical discourses on split colonial consciousness advanced by Homi Bhabha, Shibboleth explores bodily and affective registers in the experiences of Colombian immigrants. A reconsideration of the title Shibboleth—from the Hebrew shibbóleth, originally meaning "grain"—reveals how its semantic core has been erased, leaving only its pronunciation as a linguistic border used to segregate Ephraimites (Redfield 4). Echoing Salcedo’s comment on the "experience of segregation" (Tate), the rupture created by the installation materialises diverse forms of national borders—zones of daily discrimination, lawless border checks and ethnic cleansing. The varying depths of the cracks, with the deepest capable of "devouring" a small child, symbolise different forms of exploitation that Colombian immigrants endure before crossing first-world borders. As Bhabha observes, "the worn-out metaphors of resplendent national life now circulate in narratives of entry permits and passports and work permits" (164); physical objects resplendent with symbolic and material meanings of exclusion and exploitation. For instance, migratory trespass is rendered self-destructive, as large numbers continue to risk the Mexico-US border crossing, despite daily tragedies such as the Ciudad Juárez migrant centre fire. The “worn-out metaphors” can thus also be read as an expression of immigrant bodies themselves, which become symbols of unending exhaustion and decline. "Worn-out" (Bhabha 164) refers to both their fading aspirations to partake in the colonial narratives, and to the deterioration of their flesh—deprived of vitality after inhumane conditions at the borders.
Shibboleth (fig. 3) mimics the abyss of dead immigrants' bodies, and the force of national violence as it preys upon colonial subjects. Salcedo subtly captures the deadly moment of falling into the crack: despite designated staff patrolling and monitoring the installation, fifteen injuries were reported within the first month of the exhibition ("More Visitors Hurt"). Pain is refabricated upon the real flesh of spectators. The suffering of colonial subjects is no longer mediated through abstract metaphors, as Bhabha theorises. Instead, it is cemented as a flux of haptic touch—falling, sinking and disassembling—akin to the medicalised context of "rupture" involving the tearing of human tissues, skins, or limbs ("Rupture, n."). Through the act of wounding, Salcedo rekindles a language of suffering. By stripping away the comfort distance assumed in the very act of museum spectatorship, spectators are compelled to live through–skin to skin—the margins of Colombian national memory. One is transported to the treacherous jungle of Darién Gap, weaving through FARC gunfire, flash floods that erase footprints, and narcotraffickers cloaked in silence. Every step is a brushstroke of disappearance on the canvas of unnamed borders. Shibboleth surfaces what lies beyond the limits of language–the affective, the irreducible, and the ineffable—and remaps them into the topography of the rupture.
Even more importantly, only through the disappearance of the Columbian immigrants can a purified, elevated colonial consciousness be sustained. As Bhabha argues, "a pure, ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through death (5). Cleansing becomes rationalised as a purifying ritual enacted by national machinery, ridding the nation of what is deemed dirt or filth. Colonised subjects—perceived as diminutive and contaminated—have their traits essentialised and reified into fixed, fetishised stereotypes within a system that upholds narcissistic superiority. Paradoxically, to define an idealised image of the 'pure' coloniser, the immigrant must be made both invisible and ever-present—as a haunting Other continually reinscribed in national discourse. Such colonial catharsis perpetually defers the arrival of national identity, driven by its anxieties, divisions and cycles of bloodshed.
"Rupture" as Reclamation
Interpreted through the lens of "rupture", Shibboleth represents an irreconcilable split between two colonial consciousnesses within the Tate Modern, traced back to the dawn of Western modernity. It simultaneously evokes national borders, fractured limbs, and forced disappearances experienced by Colombian immigrants under the guise of colonial progress. Recalling that the final etymological root of rupture is reclamation ("Rupture, n."), a sense of tenderness resurfaces, tied to the reparative potential of healing from Colombia's traumatic national memory. In this view, Shibboleth adopts a sympathetic stance by orienting itself towards reparation. Through the gradual deepening and widening of the abyss along its cliff-like edges (Grynsztejn and Widholm 2015), its expansion carries the resonance of moving “beyond”, which Bhabha sees as crucial for the formation of a "historical subjectivity” in resistance to late-stage capitalism (217). Yet, Shibboleth complicates Bhabha’s notion by rendering Colombian history, and history itself, not only forward-facing but spatially dispersed. The quality of arbitrariness embedded within the rupture—evidenced in non-enclosed shapes and multiple points of entry and exit—is suggestive of a Deleuzian rhizotme, shooting outwards at each interval, resonant with postmodern aesthetics. The reparative framework offered by Shibboleth thus remains deterritorialised, open-ended, and—crucially—hopeful.
Works cited
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Widholm, Julie Rodrigues, and Madeleine Grynsztejn, editors. Doris Salcedo: Exhibition Guide. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2015. U of Chicago P.
Zoe is a third-year Literature student with minors in Art History and Sociology. Her proudest achievement is a film theory project mapping female wanderlust through affective geographies, written for an international conference she almost didn’t attend. Her academic curiosities orbit around postcolonial hauntings, new media, critical theory, and more. Outside academics, she enjoys physical wandering—often found reading journals in forgotten airport corners from Serbia to Georgia. If no one writes the kind of criticism she wants to read, she’s decided she might just start her own zine—complete with footnotes, of course.