Crossing boundaries : gallery, borders, and tradition : the works of Teresa Margolles

Abstract

Teresa Margolles's artworks act as documentations of the social upheaval rampant in Mexican cities throughout the nation. Margolles's work gives remembrance to the countless lives that have been lost in the battles between cartels, drug smuggling, and between these cartels and the Mexican government that have become synonymous with the perceivably troubled Mexican society. Creating works representative of the violence within the border of Mexico, Margolles transports these sites into the gallery space, creating Mexican non-sites that take non-Mexican viewers' perceptions to realties that may appear foreign to their own. Margolles's installations, which range from bullet hole ridden walls and doors, to bloodstained sheets, fragments of abandoned homes, and rooms filled with vaporized water used to clean bodies from the Mexico City morgue, connect the two diverse realities of gallery space and outside world. By connecting these disparate spaces, Margolles draws the attention of the viewer to forgotten and ignored areas of reality, creating an awareness in her viewers of the toll the narco industry has had on her native Mexico. This thesis will evaluate this connection between the inside and the outside in these installations, discussing how the artist goes beyond the display of found objects, creating Mexican non-sites in the gallery space connected to actual places and moments in time in the outside world, suggesting larger social issues that plague Mexico. Via Robert Smithson's ideas of the non-site, I argue that Margolles's works connect viewers from beyond the Mexican border to these violent realities affectively confronting foreign audiences to realize their own connection to the Mexican drug war. Margolles reveals the interconnectedness of all nations to these realities.