Teresa Margolles Makes Murder's Traces Visible at MoMA PS1

Teresa Margolles has spent three decades staring death in the face, and MoMA PS1 has now gathered the evidence. The survey "Teresa Margolles: En el lugar de los hechos" (At the Scene) opened at the Queens venue, assembling her most important installations alongside earlier work and new pieces made in the United States.

The Mexican multidisciplinary artist did not arrive at her subject secondhand. In the 1990s she worked in a Mexico City morgue as a forensic technician, processing the bodies of crime victims, and she built early artworks from the residue of that work. Critics have called it transgressive and at times ethically borderline, but also rendered with bravura and conceptual clarity. The most notorious example remains her 2003 installation "Aire," for which she took water used in the morgue to wash cadavers before autopsy and vaporized it into a museum gallery. Visitors breathed the result.

What does the new survey contain?

The exhibition's core draws on Margolles's research in the 2010s in northern Mexico, conducted during a period of extreme cartel and state violence and widespread femicide. Around those central installations, MoMA PS1 has placed earlier pieces and new American-made work — a combination the review says underscores the brutal entanglements binding the two countries.

The recent work is, by the artist's own standards, less gory. It is no less pointed. Her argument, then and now, is that violence stays in the air: murder, abduction and disappearance hover long after the fact, suffusing both the physical and the psychic landscape, and implicating not only victim and perpetrator but all of society.

Her method is collection. She gathers traces — missing-person notices, garish tabloid headlines, rubble from demolitions, objects left behind. When physical traces have faded, been forgotten or been deliberately erased, she summons conceptual ones, using artistic strategies to map and mine what the review calls the psychogeography of violence.

How does she mark a site of killing?

One documented action shows the method precisely. In late 2016, Margolles visited Dallas and, with collaborators, performed a ritual-like action at 111 sites where a murder had taken place earlier that year. At each location, a team member sponged a rectangle on the pavement, drawing water from one bucket and draining it, after each passage, into another. The gesture, Margolles says, somehow infuses the water with the essence of the place. She calls this kind of action "signalization."

That term carries the show's thesis. The sponge marks vanish; the two buckets look ordinary; the water registers nothing a forensic test could name. Whether such acts genuinely transmit memory, or only gesture at it, remains the open question in Margolles's practice — one the PS1 survey now puts before an American audience, at a moment when the violence she maps on both sides of the border shows no sign of receding.

For visitors willing to sit with that ambiguity, the exhibition runs the full arc of a career that has never averted its gaze.