Moma PS1 And Moma Host Teresa Margolles's First US Museum Show

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Mexican artist Teresa Margolles is presenting her first major United States museum exhibition,“En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene),” across MoMA PS1 and the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition spans over 30 years of her work, which confronts the heightened violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas, while also reflecting on brutality in other locations.

Margolles, born in Culiacán and based in Mexico City, utilizes minimalism to distill complex ideas of violence into seemingly simple gestures. The exhibition opens with a powerful installation in the first room of MoMA PS1's third-floor galleries. Titled“El agua de la ciudad, Dallas (The Water of the City, Dallas)” ( 2016 ), it features a 296-minute video showing individuals scrubbing sites in Dallas where someone was shot. Each segment begins with a title card displaying the victim's name, age, date of death, and address, emphasizing the magnitude and senselessness of the bloodshed, as one card notes:“victim shot while accidentally trying to enter the wrong apartment.”

Another video,“La nieve (The Snow)” ( 2015 ), is displayed on a smaller screen and depicts a man shoveling snow in Staten Island in front of a memorial altar for Eric Garner, who was killed by police in 2014. Margolles refers to these acts of cleaning or shoveling demarcated street areas as“señalizaciones” or“signalizations,” creating a stark contrast with the surrounding chaotic landscape. The exhibition also includes“Aire (Air)” ( 2003 ), where humidifiers release water collected from violent sites in New York City into a room, building on her well-known installation“Vaporization” ( 2001 ), which was first shown at MoMA PS1 in 2002 and used vaporized water from morgues.

Inés Katzenstein, one of the exhibition's curators, explained during the press preview:“we don't need the beauty of the steam anymore” because“we still breathe it every day, all the time.”

Source: Hyperallergic

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