A crack in the floor at home would be considered a homeowner's nightmare - but this enormous opening is the Tate Modern's newest art installation.

The work begins as a hairline fracture, and then widens as it winds its way 167m across the gallery’s Turbine Hall, dramatically opening the concrete floor.

The piece is by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo and is set to divide public opinion, not just to debate if it is art, but how it actually got there.

While it appears that the sculpture was made on a giant concrete slab placed over the former power station’s floor, the artist refuses to reveal her methods.

“What is important is the meaning of the piece. The making of it is not important,” said Ms Salcedo, who spent five weeks making the sculpture elsewhere before installing it in the Tate.

She said the piece, entitled Shibboleth after the biblical massacre, is a statement about racism, and the crack represents the gap between white Europeans and the rest of humanity.

“It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred,” the artist said.

“It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. For example, the space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space. And so this piece is a negative space.”

Asked how deep the fissure is, the artist said: “It’s bottomless. It’s as deep as humanity.”

Nicholas Serota, the Tate director, said there was no structural damage to the gallery’s flooring.

He said that, before the exhibit was built, bosses asked two questions “Could we realise it in the way Doris envisaged? And once the piece was created, would it damage the structural integrity of the building forever?” he said.

“The answer to the first was yes, and to the second was no,” Mr Serota said.

The installation will be removed in April next year by filling in the crack.

“There is a crack, there is a line, and eventually there will be a scar and that scar will remain,” Mr Serota said.

“It will remain as a memory of the work and also as a memorial to the issues Doris touches on.”

Shibboleth, which will be on display from tomorrow until April 6, is Ms Salcedo’s first public commission in the UK, and is the eighth in the gallery’s Unilever Series of striking installations placed in the cavernous Turbine Hall.

Last year German artist Carsten Holler created Test Site which comprised of five giant slides, and proved enormously popular with the viewing public. Other installations have included Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project in 2003, and Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider Maman in 2000.

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