It is striking in the sense that an earthquake strikes. A deepening fissure zigzags across the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. But if you were hoping for fun, for the fairground shrieks and whoops of laughter that echoed down Carsten Holler’s slides, you will undoubtedly be disappointed. Doris Salcedo’s new installation is not about family entertainment. In fact, you should probably hold on tightly to your kids because a crack that could trap a stiletto at one end threatens to swallow a toddler at the other.

Salcedo is a fundamentally political artist. A Colombian, she grew up witnessing the atrocities that occurred in her country during the undeclared civil war. Her past works have spoken of torture and abduction, murders and mass burials.

Now, in Shibboleth, her latest work, she sets out to articulate the conflicts that divide us. Tate Modern, a triumphalist monument to our modern Western culture, is quite literally riven in two by an artwork that provokes us to question the very foundations of our ways of thought.

This piece is powerfully literal. It disrupts complacency. As you peer into a chasm that looks as if it might threaten to set the whole massive edifice above you tumbling, it is hard not to feel a slight frisson. But the point of the work is less its immediate impact than a slow-burning mental response. Salcedo would like to prise apart accepted patterns of thought. Through an installation that is as much about destruction as creation, she sets out to expose fault lines. Shibboleth is less about a crack than the ideas that leak out of it.

The Turbine Hall has been a forum for big, dramatic eye-catching pieces. Salcedo is more subtle. Shibboleth aims to unsettle less in a physical than in a mental sense. It works to political, philosophical and poetic – as well as visual – effect.

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