Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss ethical issues around the performance of dead and living bodies, spectatorship and agency in the work of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (b. 1963).

Paper long abstract:

The Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (b. 1963) has devoted her career to exposing the effects of trauma on the individual and the social body, examining the relationship between violence and absence and confronting the viewer with uncomfortable realities via a focus on marginalised bodies. The interplay between a globally accessible visual language, the artist's comments on both specifically Mexican circumstances and traumatic events occurring elsewhere in the world, and her refusal of cultural stereotypes, locate her at an intersection between the international and the local. Underlying all of her work is an interest in remains and traces, and she has worked directly with human body parts and residues, and also with other materials that have been used as carriers to transport these materials between sites of collection and exhibition, and debris collected from sites where violent incidents have occurred (for example, the London riots during the summer of 2011). The material memories of the past lives of these bodies and objects are visually explored, with dead and living bodies standing as sites of memory, trauma and reflection.

However, her artistic project at times operates within an ethical grey area, and its potential to connect these traumatised bodies and spaces is complicated by the at times uneasy power relations implicit in her engagement with marginalised dead and living bodies. The performance of the bodies of others is key to her work, and this will be examined from an ethical perspective also taking into account issues around agency and spectatorship.