A high wall has been erected along the line that traces a previous commission, Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007), a 167 metre crack along the floor of the Turbine Hall that began as a hairline and expanded to a few inches in width. It was subsequently filled in. For Salcedo the work represented ‘borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred’.

Walking a dissolving line between the way ideological limits are real as well as psychological, this exhibition builds upon the inversion of the logic of creating negative space (via the filling in of its void) by materialising the real border the original work figured, literally segregating visitors between the existing gallery building and its recently built extension (the Blavatnik Building, opened in 2016).

The division between the component parts of the gallery space also functions as a division between modern and contemporary art. As the intervention of a contemporary Colombian-born artist, Salcedo’s original work not only ‘fractured’ Tate Modern, but also its concept of modern art, which at the time was still rooted within a Western conception of its history.

Through these social, spatial and conceptual splittings, the work becomes the engimatic question of the disjunctive relation of the contemporary to the modern; of the experience of contemporary art in contrast to the experience of modern art; the distributed unity and fictional same-timeness of ‘the contemporary’ versus the abstract temporal negation constitutive for ’the new’ of of individual movements and works of ‘the modern’.

Walls as borders are highly charged objects, in this case with the nationalism that drives a current of desire for withdrawal from the European Union. From the standpoint of a transdisciplinary concept of art, it marks a retreat back to a now traditional ‘modern'; to the self-sufficiency of hitherto ontologically destroyed ’mediums’, which corresponded to nation states prior to the globalization of capital - the financial deregulation of capital markets - typified by transnational forms that transcend the nation state, including the flow of variable capital (human labour) across borders, which includes art labour - the migrancy of artists.

Critical Contextual Work

Mel Bochner; Theory of Boundaries (1969-1970)