Teresa Margolles
08 August – 30 November 2011

Mexican artist, Teresa Margolles (b. 1963 Culiacán, Mexico) undertook a three‐month Production Residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios creating new work exclusively for her exhibition for the GSS galleries. This was her first residency in the United Kingdom, and solo exhibition in Scotland.

For the past two decades, Margolles has worked directly with the remains of bodies as well as with the traces of life, shrouds, burial and memory, and with the way a violent act shatters human networks and affects them on various levels.

Throughout her residency, Margolles worked 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, a place known for being one of the murder capitals of the world. Margolles has scanned, catalogued and analysed 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. Margolles travelled to Croydon, London to document the aftermath. The photographic records and debris collected from the streets will form the basis of new work.

Margolles recently won the 2012 Artes Mundi 5 Exhibition and Prize. Her work was also included in the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and Track launched by the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in the city of Ghent.