Exhibitions
Teresa Margolles How did we get out? Retrospective in MARCA: A map of absences
Teresa Margolles' retrospective, "How Did We Get Out?" , presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (MARCO), unfolds 23 works from 18 projects carried out between 2003 and 2025 as a map of absences. In this context, the museum becomes a territory of confrontation between the aesthetics and the ethical responsibility of art. Curated by Taiyana Pimentel, the exhibition does not propose a chronological retrospective, but rather a journey through the persistence of loss and the silent normalization that transforms the tragedy of Mexico's violent history into an everyday landscape.
Among the works presented, a sound installation stands out, emulating the passage of a train traveling north through the country and across the border, evoking the forced displacement of migrant bodies. Another project included is " We Have a Common Thread ," in which Margolles invited artisans from different countries to embroider fabrics impregnated with the bodily fluids of femicide victims, articulating a network of memory sustained by collective care. Through these works, the artist invites the viewer to participate in a political memory marked by an unrecorded loss.
Perhaps the artist's work engages, indirectly, with Judith Butler's concept of "mournable lives," according to which not all lives deserve the same mourning and some deaths become manageable, statistical, easily archived. In her studio, next to the Mexico City funeral home, this intuition takes on an almost literal materiality as she works with waste and archives to extract in her work the remnants and traces that refuse to disappear. There, the work consists less of representing loss than of grazing it, of excavating what remains suspended between absence and memory. It is not a provocation, but a persistent strategy to demonstrate that violence does not disappear; it seeps in, settles, and silently accompanies daily life.
In this retrospective, Margolles seems to shift from representation to a field of open questions that arise from the exhibition's title itself and multiply throughout the exhibition in each room: how loss circulates, how it is socially absorbed, how it becomes present without turning into spectacle. In Monterrey, these questions acquire a particular urgency, placing the exhibition in an unstable zone, suspended between public memory and institutional containment.
During a tour with the artist, curator Taiyana Pimentel noted: “Teresa Margolles doesn’t solve problems, she simply records them, based on direct and daily contact with reality.” We can then understand How Did We Get Out? as a space of slow confrontation that offers neither answers nor solace, where the viewer is forced to inhabit the discomfort of that which remains unresolved.
