An installation of ethereal beauty, En el aire (2003), turns on us with shocking vengeance when we learn that the water in these soap bubbles comes from the morgue and has been used to clean dead bodies prior to autopsy. In the main hall of the museum, soap bubbles are churned into the air by machines. The exhibition presents a great, moving, overwhelming oeuvre - provided we do not close our eyes to death. In many instances they evade any attempt at rational explanation by forcing the spectator into virtually physical contact with anonymous corpses. The works of Teresa Margolles are saddening and at the same time, by virtue of their beauty, captivating. Often it is solely the spectator's power of imagination that lends the inconceivable a momentary presence. She succeeds in transcending aesthetic boundaries with artistic means that function silently. Using highly unusual methods of eliminating the distance we usually place between ourselves and the dead, Margolles carries her work to an existential extreme. By means of artistic intervention, Teresa Margolles transports past life into a state of perceptibility, thus wresting the dead from anonymity and oblivion.

They hover at the very limits of the depictable, at the limits of art, precisely there where death - beyond any and all symbolisation - just manages to remain visible as the dissolution of form. The affectionate attention paid to that which death has left behind is the source of the distressing violence in these works. The bodies Teresa Margolles encounters are often buried in anonymous graves or, if the families and friends cannot afford a burial at all, cremated. Circumstances such as cause of death and age at death and the chosen forms of burial and commemoration are all directly contingent on social, economic and political conditions. When Teresa Margolles says she is interested in the 'life of the corpses', what she means is the fate of the bodies, what they experience after their death, and the connections between their lives before and their 'lives' after death. Most of them are the bodies of young people, among them children. The dead bodies she encounters and which become the subject of her artistic work are victims of violence or drug abuse, traffic casualties, unidentified corpses, etc.

Margolles participates in the work at one of the city's morgue and is an artist as well. Teresa Margolles works with death or, more specifically, with dead bodies. 'Other experiences, other deaths await us.'

Instal Death or Treat