LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- This fall, MoMA PS1 presents the first US large-scale museum exhibition of artist Teresa Margolles (Mexican, b. 1963), featuring several room-sized installations and a new commission. On view from September 24, 2026, through February 2027, Teresa Margolles: En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene) presents sculptures, photographs, and video made over the past three decades throughout the Museum’s expansive third-floor galleries. Trained as a forensic pathologist and a photographer, Margolles has created work that examines the implications of transnational violence, with particular attention to the US-Mexico border. Across mediums, her works trace disappearances, murders, political displacements, and societal neglect through methodical research, site-responsive interventions, and a radical rethinking of the memorial. In conjunction with the exhibition at MoMA PS1, a major installation by Teresa Margolles is being presented in a focused collection gallery at The Museum of Modern Art from September 25, 2026, through spring 2027.
In the early 1990s Margolles, along with other artists, formed the performance group and death metal band SEMEFO (the acronym for Mexico’s Forensic Medical Service). By the end of the decade, Margolles had begun working as an individual artist, focusing on stories and materials she found through her work in the morgue system, where she became attuned to the increasing violence in the city. In Air (2003/26), the gallery’s atmosphere is humidified using water that had been mixed with organic materials from sites where violence occurred. The work is closely related to Vaporization (2001), a signature work that Margolles showed at MoMA PS1 in 2002 in the context of the exhibition Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values. In the exhibition, Air references the artist’s longstanding history with MoMA PS1, but eliminates the visible fog of Vaporization, offering instead a more spare, distilled experience.
By the mid 2000s Margolles had begun a long-term research journey in Ciudad Juárez, a city experiencing high rates of femicides. There, she documented the desert landscapes, among other spaces, where murdered women had been found. The centerpiece of the exhibition is La Promesa (2012), a monumental sculpture created after Margolles acquired a house that had been abandoned by a family, together with all the belongings they left behind. Margolles carefully disassembled the home over 11 days and brought its debris to Mexico City. This material was used to create a long geometric barrier where, for an hour a day, participants gradually dissolved the sculpture into dust. The installation at MoMA PS1 consists of 20 tons of rubble, a fraction of the house’s total weight, alongside archival materials that document the house’s demolition and its original context of border violence. The title of the work, La Promesa, conjures the unfulfilled promises of macroeconomic policies, property ownership, and familial protection. While many of Margolles’s works deal with systemic harm along the US-Mexico border, the upcoming presentation speaks about broken promises in a way that potentially encompasses different stories and contexts. Along these lines, other works in the exhibition directly address the ongoing violence in the US. In El agua de la ciudad, Dallas (2016), for example, volunteers carefully clean the sites where violent murders took place in the city; each performance marks the site of violence and mourns the victim’s death.
Across varied scales, Margolles utilizes found objects to visualize the forces that underlie and enable violence, giving form to the magnitude of its ramifications. To create Receipt (2020), Margolles bought a box of 25 Winchester 12-gauge shells for $5.93 in the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso, Texas, four months after a white nationalist killed 23 people there. She has enlarged the receipt of this purchase to poster size, which audiences can take from a stack. Through such conceptual strategies, Margolles’s artworks bring pressing systemic issues into public view, materializing the ways violence permeates everyday life with feelings of loss.
MoMA is devoting a second-floor collection gallery to Margolles’s Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene) (2026). The work consists of a large-scale sculpture made of seven heated steel plates, on which water—imbued with organic substances recovered from sites of violence—drips onto the center of each plate, producing a hissing sound and visible steam. The work inflects Minimalist forms with both humanity and danger. The work is on view in Gallery 212 from September 25, 2026, through spring 2027.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color publication featuring essays by Ana Janevski, Inés Katzenstein, and scholar Sayak Valencia.
This dual presentation is co-organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art by Ana Janevski, Curator, Department of Media and Performance, and Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute, MoMA; with Chloë Courtney, Curatorial Assistant, and Julia Detchon, former Curatorial Associate, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA.
Born in 1963 in Culiacán, Sinaloa (Mexico), Teresa Margolles attended art school in Culiacán, studied communication sciences at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and completed training as a forensic pathologist at the Servicio Médico Forense (Forensic Medical Service of Mexico City). In 1990, together with Arturo Ángulo Gallardo, Juan Luis García Zavaleta, and others, she founded the artist collective SEMEFO (an abbreviation of Servicio Médico Forense). Recent solo exhibitions include Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2025); Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2019); BPS22 Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut, Belgium (2019); Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile (2019); Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia (2019); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2018); and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico (2012). Margolles has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, Köln, in 2026, and the Artes Mundi Prize and the Prince Claus Award for Culture and Development in 2012. She represented Mexico at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and received a special jury mention for her work at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Margolles has participated in many other biennials, including the Berlin Biennale, Germany (2012; 2010), and Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2011). Her work is held in the collections of major institutions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, Canada; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
