Teresa Margolles

Teresa Margolles (born 1963, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico) investigates the relationship between marginality and violence in a practice that includes photography, installation, video, and performance work. Her art explores the devastating effects of social unrest, impoverishment, and urban blight resulting from the government corruption that accompanies cartel control of large areas of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The artist works to increase the visibility of members of particularly vulnerable social groups including women and sex workers. 

Before Margolles’s residency, the Museum acquired two of her works: El manto negro (The black shroud) and a photograph from her Dance Floors series depicting Mexican transgender sex workers. As part of this residency, she added a third work representing the importance of performance in her practice. Together, these pieces offer different approaches to representing the violence and cultural crisis of the transnational economy of the US-Mexico border. 

Margolles represented Mexico at the 2009 Venice Biennale, and her 2019 installation in Venice received special recognition from the jury. Other recent installations or solo exhibitions include the 2020 Sydney Biennial; 21st Videobrasil Contemporary Art Biennial (2019); En la Herida, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2019); Estorbo, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia (2019); Mundos, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada (2017); and Teresa Margolles: 45 Cuerpos, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Mexico (2016). 

The artist’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Colecciõn Jumex, Mexico City; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.