TERESA MARGOLLES PRESENTS HER FIRST MAJOR SOLO EXHIBITION IN THE UNITED STATES

MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art present, starting this Thursday, the first large-scale institutional solo exhibition of Teresa Margolles (Mexico, 1963) in the United States. The show, titled En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene), brings together sculptures, photographs, and audiovisual works produced by the artist over the past three decades, including full-room installations and a newly commissioned piece.

Trained in forensic pathology and photography, Margolles has developed a body of work centered on the implications of transnational violence, with particular attention to the US-Mexico border. Across various media, her work addresses disappearances, murders, forced political displacement, and social neglect, through methodical research and a rethinking of the forms of commemoration.

In the early 1990s, Margolles co-founded, along with other artists, the performance group and death metal band SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense de México). By the late 1990s she had begun working individually, drawing on stories and materials found during her time at the state morgue, where she became aware of the city's growing violence.

Among the works on view is Aire (2003, 2026), in which the gallery atmosphere is humidified with water infused with organic materials collected from sites where acts of violence occurred. The piece revisits her landmark work Vaporización (2001), presented at MoMA PS1 in 2002, though this version does away with the visible mist in favor of a more austere experience.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is La promesa (2012), a monumental sculpture made from an abandoned house that Margolles acquired and dismantled over eleven days in Ciudad Juárez, a city with high rates of femicide where the artist conducted extensive research. With the remains of the house, she built a geometric barrier that was gradually disintegrated by volunteers until it became dust. The MoMA PS1 installation includes 13 tons of rubble —a fraction of the house's total weight— along with archival material documenting the demolition process and the border violence that originated it.

Other works in the exhibition directly address contemporary violence in the United States. In El agua de la ciudad, Dallas (2016), volunteers mark with water the sites across the city where murders took place, in a performance that demarcates the site of violence and mourns the victim. For Receipt (2020), Margolles purchased a box of 25 Winchester 12-gauge shotgun shells at the Walmart in Cielo Vista, El Paso, Texas, four months after a white supremacist killed 23 people there; the receipt was enlarged to poster size and made available for the public to take.

At MoMA, a second-floor gallery is dedicated to Margolles's Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene, 2026), a large-scale sculpture made up of seven heated steel plates onto which water infused with organic substances recovered from sites of violence drips, producing a sharp hiss and visible steam.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color publication with essays by Ana Janevski, Inés Katzenstein, and scholar Sayak Valencia. The dual presentation is co-organized by Janevski, Curator, Department of Media and Performance, and Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, together with Chloë Courtney and Julia Detchon, of the Department of Drawings and Prints.

Teresa Margolles: En el lugar de los hechos is on view from September 24, 2026, at MoMA PS1, and at Gallery 212 of The Museum of Modern Art from September 17, 2026, through spring 2027. New York, United States.