Teresa Margolles

Teresa Margolles, Somre el Dolor (On Sorrow), 2006

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Teresa Margolles’ (b.1963, Culiacá, Sinaloa, Mexico) work is unique and extreme. For 14 years she has been dealing with what she calls ‘the follow up of the body after life, and the appropriation of human inert elements to understand death in its social dimension’. Margolles pursues this aim by investigating the ‘life of the corpse’, that is, the physical and social transformation of what we could call the after-body, and its metaphoric power. She has been so devoted to this unprecedented artistic research that she set up her studio at Mexico City’s morgue.

Bizarre as it is, Margolles’s art has profound roots in Mexican culture. Dating from pre-Columbian days, Mexicans have a close and quite natural relationship with death, expressed in the Dia de los Muertos celebrations. On the other hand, her work is a reaction to the increasing violence all over the world, and its daily presence in the media. Taking a more particular stance, it delves into the effects of growing criminality in huge Third World cities. Margolles’ systematic investigation has taken her from a direct, macabre approach at the beginning of her career, as part of the SEMEFO Group in Mexico, to the more conceptual, sober, even minimal poetics characteristic of her personal work today. As the artist puts it, she now tries ‘not to exhibit the physical horror, but the silence’.

Teresa Margolles at Liverpool Biennial 2006

Somre el Dolor (On Sorrow), 2006
Glass Installation
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2006
Exhibited in public realm