Teresa Margolles

Overview

Teresa Margolles deals in her work with the dark sides of the Megalopolis Mexico City and with Latine America in general. She makes her subject matter the worthlessness of human life of the poor classes but also the decadent life style of the super rich. Through her work she gets in contact with corruption, with the drug scene, with bodies of not to be identified victims. For us Europeans she breaks a taboo with the merciless way she deals with death which derives from acient Indian faith and became part of the modern Mexican society. Margolles' mediums include installation, scultpure, photography and video.

Aire, 2003

With this installation, Ms Margolles demands the visitor an almost unbearable physical contact with the nameless, which end up, day by day, in the cityʻs morgues. She collected the water used to cleanse dead bodies, desinfected it and lets it into the gallery space through two vaporizers. You could tell there happens kind of a transsubstantiation but which gives no cause for concern for your health. But the idea of getting in touch with the last and holy washing of unknown makes you freak out. So to say it is not the artist who breaks the taboo of death, it is the city self, which otherwise feeds the water back into the cycle of the city.

Anden (Sidewalk), 1999

This work consists of a series of color photographs, which documents the same titled action. Ms Margolles asked to tear up a sidwalk for a length of 36 meters in Cali, the “drogue capital” in Columbia. Then she invited dependents of killed people to add personal belongings of the victims before she had tared again the sidewalk. Tarjetas para picar cocaina (Cards to cut Cocaine), 1997-99. This work consists of cards which look like credit cards and of color photographs, which documents the same titled action. Ms Margolles had to produce cards with portraits of killed people within the drogue scene. Then she handled them out to drug addicts who used them right away to cut cocaine.

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