Teresa Margolles’ Delicate Dealings with Death at The Dowse

MEDIA RELEASE
For immediate release: 6 December 2011

Festival Beauty

Teresa Margolles’ Delicate Dealings with Death at The Dowse

For the New Zealand International Arts Festival, The Dowse presents So It Vanishes, an exhibition of two works by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. Margolles, who represented Mexico at the 2009 Venice Biennale, is internationally renowned for evoking challenging ideas in beautiful ways, exploring the fragility in all of us. So It Vanishes opens on 25th February and runs until 20 May, 2012.

‘The power of art scares me so much. I realised that I didn’t know how to talk about human loss, human pain. I thought my own pain was the most important, but then I discovered that there is a collective pain,’ Teresa Margolles In The Air is an empty room containing only ethereal bubbles that invite you to play.

Pleasure may turn to horror however when visitors discover the bubbles hold an essence of water from a city morgue; ‘the stigma of death turns the beautiful into the horrific’ (Amanda Coulson, Frieze). In addition, just for The Dowse, a series of abstract portraits of the dead, containing a similar essence of run-off water and blood, will be displayed on a billboard outside the gallery. Curator Claudia Arozqueta says, ‘So It Vanishes explores memory more than death by giving mourning to anonymous corpses and reminding us of the magic of being alive.’

Teresa Margolles is one of the foremost artists of her generation. She currently lives and works in Mexico City but was born in 1963 in Culiacan, a Mexican town scarred by the drug trade, a place where many die young and violently. Families can often not afford proper burials so corpses are caught in a bureaucratic system of ‘disposal’, intending to make them smoothly disappear. Margolles, who works only with the bodies of those that suffered a violent death, says she wants to rescue these victims from invisibility and fulfil ‘a social function of mourning, of marking the disappearance of a generation.’

After studying art and communication sciences at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Margolles gained a diploma in forensic medicine at the National University, Mexico City. Since the early 1990s, she has researched the physical and psychological transformation of the body after death, what she calls “the life of the corpse”, immersing herself in morgues; her laboratory, studio and material’s source. Margolles has exhibited extensively all over the world, including solo, group shows and at major biennales.

Curator Claudia Arozqueta is also from Mexico City. Before moving to Wellington she lived in Moscow where she curated Crossing Boundaries, II Moscow Biennale of Young Art, (2010) and Manimal, National Centre for Contemporary Arts/International University Moscow, (2009). Claudia's writing has been published in many international arts publications and she is currently Curator and Manager of Wellington’s Enjoy Gallery.

Teresa Margolles: So It Vanishes
25 February – 20 May, 2012
The Dowse Art Museum | FREE ENTRY
www.dowse.org.nz

ENDS