Oriana Baddeley ///

Teresa Margolles and the pathology of everyday death

A fascination with the forensics of death is not in itself an unusual focus of interest for artists and curators but recently the work of Teresa Margolles has attracted the attention of an increasingly large audience. While her reputation has been growing since the 1990s, based on her work as a founder member of the Mexico City based collective SEMEFO (an acronym derived from Servicio Médico Forense /Forensic Medical Service), in recent years it has become established outside of Mexico and expanded from dedicated followers of her work to encompass a more general critical interest. While deeply political, the themes of Margolles’s art grow out of her fascination with what she has called ‘the life of corpses’, and the ways that even in death, social hierarchies and injustices remain. The materials that she uses in her art break taboos of realism even in the reality-addicted societies we inhabit. The re-use in her art of human remains, body parts and fluids contaminated with the ‘real’ processes of the afterlife, repel and frighten many, but nonetheless force her audiences to encounter those aspects of the passage of death usually hidden from conscious thought.