Matadero Madrid center for contemporary creation
TERESA MARGOLLES
Las llaves de la ciudad (The Keys to the City)
Institution
Margolles has invited Antonio Hernández Camacho of Ciudad Juárez to share his trade with the public, sharing anecdotes about the terrible situation he lives in, being a business owner in a border town riddled with drugs and violence. For 40 years, Antonio ran his business on Avenida Juárez, one of the city's busiest streets. There he engraved keys with words, making souvenirs from them. In the struggle to keep his store afloat, Antonio worked weekends on the other side of the border in El Paso, Texas, a reality that puts in stark relief the social and economic conditions of life on the US/Mexico border. Problems arising recently, such as extorsion, have forced him to close his business.
Las llaves de la ciudad (The Keys to the City), by Teresa Margolles, debuted at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California, USA, in February 2010. It now arrives in Madrid after stops in Dublin and Boston.
Teresa Margolles (Culiacán, México, 1963) has had a long career as an artist. She was a founding member of SEMEFO. She has had solo shows in the Museum für Moderne Kunst of Frankfurt/Main, the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen of Düsseldorf, the Frac of Lorraine and the Kunstmuseum of Bern. In 2009 she represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale with her installation “¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar?”(What else can we talk about?). In addition, she has participated in a number of international biennials (Goteborg, 2003; Kwangju, 2004; Baltric Trienal, Vilinius, 2005; Liverpool, 2006) and other significant collective exhibitions such as ECO – Arte Contemporáneo Mexicano, MNCARS, 2005; Indelible Images (Trafficking Between Life and Death), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values ,P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York.
Teresa Margolles' work scrutinizes Mexico's social realities. She has chosen as her atelier the morgue, the dissecting table and- recently- the violent streets of Mexico, which not only show us death, but are witness to a particular social anguish. Margolles works with brands to study the repercussions of violent acts that destroy human networks.
Since 1990, when Teresa Margolles founded- along with other members of the group- SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense- Forensic Medical Service), the morgue and the autopsy room have become her workplace. Her work focuses on researching not so much death as the socio-cultural implications made manifest by the lifeless bodies of the current Mexican society marked by violence and by economic inequality. For years, the artist has searched in her photographs, objects, videos and installations for scraps of memories, and signs of the social conditions and experiences lived out by anonymous corpses.
Margolles has used the water left over after washing bodies during autopsies to fill a room with steam and to wet papers to create poetic abstractions. In 1999 she met the request of a woman who had miscarried but lacked the means to give the fetus a proper burial. Instead it was turned into a work of art: Margolles created a cement chamber somewhere between a coffin and a piece of minimalist art. Other works of hers use the clothes or objects belonging to children who died the victimas of violence and the artist has even made an aural piece with a trepanning operation.
Teresa Margolles' work scrutinizes Mexico's social realities. She has chosen as her atelier the morgue, the dissecting table and- recently- the violent streets of Mexico, which not only show us death, but are witness to a particular social anguish. Margolles works with brands to study the repercussions of violent acts that destroy human networks.
Since 1990, when Teresa Margolles founded- along with other members of the group- SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense- Forensic Medical Service), the morgue and the autopsy room have become her workplace. Her work focuses on researching not so much death as the socio-cultural implications made manifest by the lifeless bodies of the current Mexican society marked by violence and by economic inequality. For years, the artist has searched in her photographs, objects, videos and installations for scraps of memories, and signs of the social conditions and experiences lived out by anonymous corpses.
Margolles has used the water left over after washing bodies during autopsies to fill a room with steam and to wet papers to create poetic abstractions. In 1999 she met the request of a woman who had miscarried but lacked the means to give the fetus a proper burial. Instead it was turned into a work of art: Margolles created a cement chamber somewhere between a coffin and a piece of minimalist art. Other works of hers use the clothes or objects belonging to children who died the victimas of violence and the artist has even made an aural piece with a trepanning operation.
