Teresa Margolles: «La búsqueda»

24.05 – 17.08 / 2014
Migros Museum, Zurich

The works by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (b. 1963, Culiacán) revolve around themes such as death, violence and social exclusion. Since the start of the 1990s, she has also worked in the forensic medicine department of an autopsy facility in Mexico City, where numerous, mostly anonymous, victims of violent crime are brought in on a daily basis. Her works, which adhere to a minimalist approach, are produced against this societal backdrop. Since 2005, this artist has mainly examined the extreme violence in the northern Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez and the drug war that is raging there. Also, for her first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Margolles is addressing Ciudad Juárez as a place of crime. At the center is a series of female homicides that has been ongoing since the start of the 1990s. Here, Margolles is primarily interested in the traces that the brutal crimes leave behind on architectures, and how these shape people’s everyday lives. By transposing such traces into an exhibition space, the artist generates a charged interplay between mundane presentation and grim realism.

Teresa Margolles’s works have been exhibited internationally, for instance at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (solo exhibition, 2010/11), Venice Biennale (2009), Manifesta (2008), Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (solo exhibition, 2004), Kunsthalle Wien (solo exhibition, 2003) and Lyon Biennale (2000). In 2010, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst presented her work 37 cuerpos / 37 Bodies (2007) as part of the group exhibition Une Idée, une Forme, un Être – Poésie / Politique du corporel.

Curated by Raphael Gygax, Curator, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst