TERESA MARGOLLES

Teresa Margolles is a Mexican conceptual artist, photographer, videographer, and performance artist who researches the social causes and consequences of death. Margolles communicates observations from the morgue in her home city, Mexico City, and other morgues located in Latin America, as well as the extended emotional distress and social consequences that occur as product of death by murder. While working around the topic of the body, her work extends to the families of the victims, the remaining living bodies that witness the death of a loved one. The main medium of her work comes from the morgues themselves, which she transforms into sensory experiences that provoke a feeling of memory to the audience.

On view in the exhibition is La Sombra (Water Bottles) (2016) a large photographic document from her large-scale public activation La Sombra which took place in Los Angeles. In addition to a sculptural monument installed in Echo Park, the work included a year of research and exploration of the sites around L.A. where individuals had been killed in violent crimes. Margolles and her team visited the sites to ritually cleanse them with water. These ceremonially poured water onto over 100 sites and recollected the water and stored it in a bottle labeled with the name of the person and the date and site of their death. The photograph of these water bottles, documents the remnants of this act, contains the footprints of those that once were, the memory of their lives and their tragic violent passing. This work is a portrait, a document, an archive of those lives and their untimely deaths.

Teresa Margolles (b.1963) is from Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. She currently lives and works between Mexico City and Madrid.  Teresa Margolles’ works examines the social causes and consequences of violence. For her, the morgue accurately reflects society, particularly that of her home country where deaths caused by drug-related crimes, poverty, political crisis and the government’s inept response has devastated communities. She has developed a unique, restrained language in order to speak for her silenced subjects, the victims discounted as ‘collateral damage’ of the conflict. Margolles holds a degree in Forensic Medicine and Communication Science from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. Her work has been shown internationally in institutions such as Mattatoio, Rome (2021); MUAC, Mexico City (2021); Es Baluard, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2020); BPS22, Charleroi, Belgium (2019); Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2019); MSSA, Santiago de Chile (2019); MAMBO Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (2019);  Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan (2018); the Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2018); the Musée d’art contemporain of Montréal (2017); the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2015), the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (2014), the Migros Museum, Zurich (2014), the Tate Modern, London (2012); the MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2008); the Museo del Barrio, New York (2008); The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2007); the Kunsthalle, Vienna (2007); the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Brétigny, France (2006), The Museum für Moderne Kunst of Frankfurt, Germany (2004); P.S.1/MoMa, New York (2002); the Kunst-Werke in Berlin (2002) and the South London Gallery (2002) among others. The work of Teresa Margolles is part of many art collections around the world like Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, US; Perez Art Museum, Miami; MACBA, Barcelona, among many others.