Teresa Margolles’ New commission for Glasgow Sculpture Studios at its new venue
On the 20 April 2012 Glasgow Sculpture Studios (GSS) will inaugurate the Public Programme at its new permanent home, The Whisky Bond by premiering a major new body of work by Teresa Margolles (b. 1963 Culiacán, Mexico) that has been created during a 5-month Production Residency, when she lived and worked in Glasgow.
Margolles' Public Program begins with a free public lecture as part of The Glasgow School of Art's prestigious Friday Event Lecture Series, organized by The GSA's School of Fine Art which will take place at 11am on the 16 March 2012 at Glasgow Film Theatre. The event is free and will be conducted in Spanish & English.
Margolles' new work has been made exclusively for the new GSS galleries and is co-commissioned with Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 20 April–7 May 2012. It will also feature during Glasgow Science Festival 5–17 June 2012. This is her first residency in the United Kingdom, and solo exhibition of new work in Scotland.
For the past two decades, Margolles has not so much worked directly with the remains of bodies but rather with the traces of life, with shrouds, burial and memory, and with the way a violent act shatters human networks and affects them on various levels.
"Teresa Margolles is one of Mexico's most respected artists. Her work is strong both physically and emotionally and communicates the complexities of the site that has deeply informed her production since 2004: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The artist pays homage to this border city and its people through her sculptures, installations, videos and photography, exploring the social, political, economic, cultural and spiritual tensions that exist within this urban sprawl. To experience Juárez accompanying Margolles, is to begin to understand her passion and commitment to this place and its inhabitants, to meet the family she has created there of students, teachers, friends and workers who participate, and assist in realizing her artworks. It is to understand the energy she dedicates into translating her work from a Juárez context to a European one and finally, to realize that making some art, like living, requires the willingness to commit and to take risks. Margolles does that, and by carefully going into her work, one understands that so does every citizen of this metropolis", says the Mexican writer Jessica Berlanga Taylor. A commissioned text by her will accompany the exhibition.
Throughout her residency, Margolles has been working with a photographic archive by living photographer Luis Alvarado, which she recovered. The archive includes more than 4,000 images taken in the seventies and eighties in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Juárez is now infamous as one of the murder capitals of the world. Margolles has scanned, catalogued and analyzed the negatives in order to—in her own words—"look at the past as a way of understanding the future."
In parallel, Margolles' initial site visit to Glasgow coincided with the civil riots in England and the days of social and political unrest that followed. Margolles travelled to London to document the aftermath. The photographic records and debris collected from the streets will form the basis of new work, which reflects on the idea that all places have a story of suffering etched into their past.
Margolles is currently shortlisted for the 2012 prestigious Artes Mundi 5 Exhibition and Prize, and exhibiting in the 2012 Adelaide Festival. Forthcoming presentations include the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
Glasgow Sculpture Studios
At The Whisky Bond
Dawson Road G4 9SS
www.glasgowsculpturestudios.org
