Teresa Margolles

Culiacán, Sinaloa, México, 1963 

           Teresa Margolles work examines the social causes and consequences of violence. To her, morgues reflect society, and she focuses her work on the study of these spaces in Mexico, her native country, where drug-related crimes, poverty, political crises, and the government's ineffective response to all of the above, have killed thousands of people. Her unique language seeks to give visibility to those forgotten by the system, to the victims of the "collateral damage" of conflicts. From photography, installation, performance, sculpture, and painting, her work ranges from the immaterial and ethereal to the monumental and grotesque.

            Her work has recently been exhibited in Austria, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, and the United States. She has received numerous awards, including the Artes Mundi Award and the Prince Claus Award for Culture and Development in 2012. In 2019, Margolles received a special mention from the jury for her work, ¿De qué más podríamos hablar?, at the 58th Venice Biennale, a subtle intervention in the space in which she sought to draw the attendees' attention with blood-impregnated fabrics and glass, encrusted with jewels, just like those of criminals, among other installations that insisted that the territories wounded by death be reflected upon.

            The common thread that sustains her pieces, however, is built beyond its link with the notion of death; it further expands, with the ability to take art to the limit of any ethical approach. Her work is political because it manages to confront the viewer with a reality that will never be right, and that extends to the maximum universal values and legal or moral norms that are assumed to be essential. Margolles seeks to remind us that, regardless of political leadership, the world faces an endless violence that is on the rise. She leaves, in the flesh, the normalization of kidnappings, massacres, hangings, femicides, murders that go unpunished, the degradation of entire cities, and, in general, the violence involved in society.