Latest Tate Modern installation is a yawning chasm

LONDON (Reuters) - Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has filled Tate Modern's cavernous Turbine Hall with a hole as the latest work in the art gallery's annual installation series.

Dubbed Shibboleth after the biblical massacre of the same name, the work is a trench dug into the concrete floor of the former power station and running its entire 167 metres length starting as a crack and ending as a chasm.

Salcedo said the work -- which took five weeks to dig and may yet run into health and safety problems -- symbolised racial hatred and societal division in general.

"I always try to relate my work to tragedy," she told a news conference to unveil the work that will be on show to the public until April next year.

Tate director Nicholas Serota said that unlike previous installations in the Turbine Hall, this work would endure forever.

"There is a crack. There is a line and eventually there will be a scar," he said. "That is something that we and other artists will have to live with."

In a remark that might have been somewhat unsettling to the urbane Serota, when asked how deep the trench was at its deepest, Salcedo replied: "It is bottomless".