Teresa Margolles: Los Herederos - Die Erben

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Limmatstrasse, Zurich

„Violence, homicide and death are the focus of Teresa Margolles’ artistic and political discourse. She forges an aesthetics that is related to death on the one hand and to the lifeless body in its different stages and with all its sociocultural implications on the other.

 

In her meticulous research, Margolles and a group of friends seeks out the crime scenes of the acts of violence to collect traces from the ground in situ using linens. Here, Margolles is interested in the aspect of abstraction and the representation of physicality. Narration and testimony form the centre of her work. The “colour“ used in the “pictures“ displayed in the exhibition is predominantly human blood. It stems from the victims of violent acts who were killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts between the drugs mafia, rival gangs and executing authorities of the Mexican Government.

 

Margolles’ linens are not only the picture itself, but their material content and significance turn them into symbols and carriers of symbols. Margolles considers these pieces of cloth as a means of communication, as vehicles that serve to transport meanings on a double level: The material being an actual carrier of absorbed blood and other bodily secretions as well as a conveyor of history and histories. Margolles’ art is deeply political and sociocritical, telling of a society in which violence has become the norm and where indolence, a lack of solidarity, recklessness and egoism are constantly increasing. (Original text: Hartwig Knack, 2008)