{"id":411723,"date":"2026-05-04T19:32:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T19:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/411723\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T19:32:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T19:32:13","slug":"first-us-survey-of-mexican-artist-teresa-margolles-coming-this-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/411723\/","title":{"rendered":"First US Survey of Mexican Artist Teresa Margolles Coming This Fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

News<\/a><\/p>\n

MoMA PS1 in NYC will bring together several works at the intersection of grief and violence, often with a focus on the US-Mexico border.<\/p>\n


\n \"Rhea
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"First
\n Teresa Maroglles, “Mil Veces un Instante” (“A Thousand Times in an Instant”) (2024), Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square in London (photo Krisztian Elek\/SOPA Images\/LightRocket via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

MoMA PS1 in New York City will present the first United States survey of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles this fall. Formally trained as a forensic pathologist, Margolles has spent over 30 years creating sculptures, performances, and installation work with organic and bodily materials sourced from homicide victims, morgues, and crime scenes.<\/p>\n

The Queens-based institution will bring together select works across the artist’s various confrontations of murder and violence along the US-Mexico border, as well as the treatment, disposal, and remembrance of the human body after its life has been taken. In a 2026 evolution of Margolles’s ongoing Air (2003\u2013) series, a MoMA PS1 gallery will be humidified with water imbued with degradable material from homicide sites. The needle is pointed directly at the US in another work in the exhibition, \u201cEl agua de la ciudad, Dallas\u201d (2016), a documented performance through which Margolles and volunteers carefully clean up multiple murder sites across the city.<\/p>\n

\"\"A gallery visitor walks among Teresa Margolles’s A Trav\u00e9s (2007\u201322), a three-phase performance and installation work derived from used t-shirts worn by undocumented Central and South American workers across New York City (photo Phoebe D’Heurle, courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery)<\/p>\n

In conjunction with the PS1 presentation, the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan will host Margolles’s new experiential installation starting September 17. \u201cAproximaci\u00f3n al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene)\u201d (2026) will engage viewers by dripping water onto seven steel hotplates. As in Air, the water also carries material evidence of violent death, and will sizzle and steam with each droplet that makes contact with the plates.<\/p>\n

\u201cMargolles\u00a0shifts grief from the protected space of memorial to the unsettled and living terrain of everyday life,\u201d said Ana Janevski, a curator from MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance, in an email to Hyperallergic. Janesvki co-organized the survey with In\u00e9s Katzenstein, a curator of Latin American Art and Director of the museum’s Cisneros Research Institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrieving becomes political not through grand symbolism but through proximity, through the unsettling awareness that the spaces we inhabit and the objects we touch are entangled with the history of loss,\u201d Janevski added.<\/p>\n

\"\"Teresa Margolles’s sculptural outcome for\u00a0\u201cLa promesa\u201d consists of 22 tons of rubble and remains of a demolished house from Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, Mexico. The work is in the collection of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo, DGAV-UNAM, in Mexico City.<\/p>\n

Alongside various museum presentations and accolades, Margolles represented Mexico in the 53rd Venice Biennale<\/a> in 2009 and was selected in 2024 for a visceral Trafalgar Square plinth commission<\/a> commemorating trans and nonbinary Mexicans and Britons. <\/p>\n

The artist’s international acclaim begins with her upbringing in Culiac\u00e1n, the capital city of Sinaloa and the primary headquarters of its infamous drug-trafficking cartel. After moving to Mexico City for secondary education, Margolles pursued forensic pathology and began working directly with the deceased in morgues, where the trends of dignity and disposability ultimately informed life in the city. <\/p>\n

\"\"A film still from Teresa Margolles’s\u00a0\u201cIrrigaci\u00f3n\u00a0(Irrigation)\u201d (all photos \u00a9 2026 Teresa Margolles; image courtesy the artist and mor charpentier, Paris)<\/p>\n

Blood, fat, sebum, and other remnants of life became central matter in Margolles’s practice, as have inorganic materials like broken glass or soaked clothes that either connoted or cleaned away evidence of death. In \u201cReceipt\u201d (2020), the artist enlarged the transaction slip for a $5.93 case of shotgun shells she purchased from the El Paso Walmart months after a gunman killed 23 people<\/a> in a racially motivated mass shooting<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Central to the survey is Margolles’s \u201cLa promesa\u201d (2012), the extended documentation and sculptural outcome of the artist’s acquisition and carefully managed demolition of an abandoned house in the border town of Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez. The work’s forthcoming takeover of another MoMA PS1 gallery examines the systemic failures that led to the likely necessity of the home’s desertion. <\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike the sensationalized images the news cycle presents \u2014 in which\u00a0we see victims of violence, weapons, and ruins of war \u2014 Margolles takes an entirely different approach by focusing on experiences of grief and loss,\u201d Katzenstein explained to Hyperallergic. <\/p>\n

The survey is set to open on September 24 and will run through spring 2027. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News MoMA PS1 in NYC will bring together several works at the intersection of grief and violence, often…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-411723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}