Teresa Margolles' aesthetic of death.

The artist Teresa Margolles, Mexico's foremost proponent of corpse art, is based in
Mexico City and exhibits her work across the world. Her central obsessions are death,
the dead body, and violence, themes which are manifested in her exploration of `la
vida del cadaver' (`the life of the corpse'). For the early part of her career during the
1990s, Margolles worked as part of the SEMEFO collective, and she has subsequently
maintained her artistic career on a solo basis. She works with the bodies of individuals
who were socially and economically disadvantaged during life, and has used body
parts and residues such as blood and fat in her works, as well as objects from the
morgue that have come into contact with corpses. The corpse itself, however, is not
often revealed; rather its presence is suggested by raw materials such as air and water.
The artist employs deceptively subtle means of representation that operate on multiple
sensory planes in order to draw the spectator into contemplation of the unsettling
realities of social inequality and violence in her native Mexico, which sometimes
occurs through direct physical contact between the viewer and the raw materials used
by Margolles in her art works. The boundaries between life and death, and the inside
and the outside of the body, are transgressed. A selection of works taken from
different points in the artist's career will be explored from a range of theoretical
perspectives including the sociology of the body, the sociology of death,
philosophical approaches to the experience of contemplating death and the corpse,
and the history of the exploration of these themes in visual culture. In this way, the
artist uses an artistic language that may be interpreted across borders, to address a
specifically local set of circumstances.