Teresa Margolles facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Teresa Margolles
Born	Teresa Margolles 1963 Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico
Nationality	Mexican
Known for	Photography Videography Performance art Conceptual art
Awards	Prince Claus Award (2012) Artes Mundi (2012)

Teresa Margolles (Culiacán, Mexico,1963) is a conceptual artist, photographer, videographer, and performance artist. As an artist she 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. Margolles finds particularly remarkable how the activity inside the morgues reflects the truth from the outside. In the case of Mexico City, she observes that the majority of victims belong to the lower classes. "Looking at the dead you see society".

Life and career

Margolles was originally trained as a forensic pathologist, and holds academic degrees in science communication and forensic medicine from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City. She also conducted art studies at the Direccion de Fomento a la Cultura Regional del Estado de Sinaloa, Culiacan, Mexico.

Visitors interacting with 'Escuchando los Sonidos de la muerte, by visual artist Teresa Margolles.

In 1990, Margolles founded an artists' collective titled SEMEFO, which is an anagram for the Mexican coroner's office. Other core members of SEMEFO included Arturo Angulo and Carlos Lopez, yet the group had a loose membership. Through performance and installation-based work, SEMEFO commented on social violence and death in Mexico.

Margolles left SEMEFO in the late 1990s. Since then her independent art practice continues to explore themes of death, violence and exclusion, specifically using forensic material and human remains. One of Teresa Margolles’ first solo exhibitions to reach a larger audience was her show in the Museum Für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany titled Muerte Sin Fin (Death Without End) in 2004. In this interactive, installation-based art, Margolles uses her usual materials from the morgue to draw attention to death, to the anonymous corpses resulting from violent killings in Mexico City, and to people’s inclination to disassociate from death and dying. Within this exhibit, there are seven components that each help to convey Margolles’ message about the importance of death, reinforcing its gravity and facing it head on. The first installation is titled En el aire, a hallway full of soap bubbles from a machine that creates a bright, peaceful atmosphere, but in reality, it’s made from the water used to wash the bodies before an autopsy in the morgue. It demonstrates a reminder about how fragile life can be while also affirming one’s own consciousness and awareness of death. A well-known part of this exhibit named Papeles, features rows of varying shades of water colored paper that also incorporates the water used in the morgue, but has blood and fat from the bodies shown as well. Margolles creates these as a type of portrait, making a physical memento of these lives that were lost.

In 2023 she was invited to participate in the 16th Cuenca Biennale, in Ecuador, curated by Ferran Barenblit, where she presented the piece "El poder".

Solo and significant group exhibitions

Margolles has been presenting in venues all over the world.

• 2004: Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
• 2005: Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
• 2008: Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria
• 2009: Venice Biennale (Mexican pavilion), Italy
• 2010: Fridericianum, Kassel, Margolles, Teresa. Frontera
• 2010: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, USA
• 2010: Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS), Mexico City, Mexico
• 2011: MUSEION, Bolzano, Italy
• 2012: Lion Arts Centre, Adelaide, Australia
• 2012: El Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico
• 2014: Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, Spain
• 2014: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland
• 2015: Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, USA
• 2016: Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
• 2016: Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, USA
• 2018: Padiglione D'Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan, Italy
• 2019: The Gift of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida
• 2019: Venice Biennale
• 2024: Fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. (scheduled)

Public Collections (selection)

The work of Teresa Margolles is featured in international collections around the world. Installations and examples of her artistic practice are held in permanent collections at

• Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida
• Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Centre Pompidou, Paris
• Colección Jumex, Mexico City
• Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
• Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom

Literature

• Kittelmann, Udo & Klaus Görner (2004) Teresa Margolles. Muerte sin fin, Ostfildern-Ruit, ISBN: 978-3-7757-1473-0
• Margolles, Teresa (2011) Margolles, Teresa. Frontera, Walther König, Cologne, ISBN: 978-3-86560-976-2
• Downey, Anthony (2009) "127 Cuerpos: Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Commemoration", Lund Humphries, London, ISBN: 978-1-84822-016-4
• Scott Bray, R (2007) "En piel ajena: The work of Teresa Margolles" Law Text Culture 11(1), pgs. 13-50, URL: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol11/iss1/2/
• Downey, Anthony (2012) "In the Event of Death: Teresa Margolles and the Life of the Corpse", in Artes Mundi 5, pp. 62–66
• Heartney, Eleanor; Posner; Princenthal; Scott (2013) The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, published by Prestel Verlag, pp. 206 – 213, [[ISBN|ISBN: 978-3-7913-4759-2]]
• Sileo, Diego. (2019) Teresa Margolles: Ya Basta Hijos de Puta, Silvana Editorale, ISBN: 978-8836639168
• Baddeley, Oriana (2007) 'Teresa Margolles and the Pathology of Everyday Death.' Dardo, 5. pp. 60-81. ISSN 1886-0893

See also

In Spanish: Teresa Margolles para niños