On Blood

• Date: September 19, 2020
• Schedule: from 7.00 pm to 8.15 pm. 15 minute slots.
• Location: Floor 0
• Free entry with prior registration. Limited capacity: 50 people (5 groups of 10).

Es Baluard Museu presents the new performance by Teresa Margolles titled «On Blood» linked to the exhibition «The Stone». Devised by the artist from her experiences lived on the Simón Bolívar International Bridge in Cúcuta, the main land route that connects the border between Colombia and Venezuela. The performance brings us closer to a context in which the contraband of products and people, violence and the trafficking of goods, become factors that accentuate migration crises and the fact of not being able to speak about human rights.

With this action, Margolles proposes a metaphor based on the circulation of banknotes (the Bolívares, today without any value, are back in the game) and emphasizes, with overwhelming power and poetry, how they are, like all coins, stained with blood. The action appeals to the responsibilities we all have in the face of current humanitarian crises and denounces how the human being has become a commodity, perverting our raison for being.

The performance will last approximately one hour and a quarter, divided into 15 minutes slots, in groups of 10 people maximum. Attendees must fill out the registration form to obtain their entry, due to the preventive measures against COVID-19.

«On Blood» will be documented on video, as a record of the performance that will later be exhibited at the Museum as part of the exhibition.

Teresa Margolles (Culiacán, Sinaloa, 1963) studied Arts at the Dirección de Fomento a la Cultura Regional del Estado de Sinaloa (DIFOCUR). She originally trained as a forensic pathologist at the Servicio Mexicano Forense (mexican forensic service), and holds a Diploma in Science of communication from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City. Since its inception with the SEMEFO (Forensic Medical Service) group, she has focused on morgues and dissection rooms. More recently, in the streets of Mexico and other cities, such as Cúcuta, she has concentrated on scenes of death, testimonies of unrest and social crisis. She works, more than with the remains of the body, with the traces of life that are reflected on shrouds, burials, and memory, as well as in the way in which a violent act destroys and affects human networks at different levels.

Her most recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and at the Kunsthalle Krems in Austria (2019), at the Witte the With in Rotterdam (2018) and at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017), among many others. She has participated in two editions of the Venice Biennale (2019, 2009) and in other international biennials (Göteborg, 2003; Kwangju, 2004; Baltic Triennal, Vilinius, 2005; Liverpool, 2006) in addition to other relevant collective exhibitions such as ECO – Arte Contemporáneo Mexicano, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2005); Indelible Images (trafficking between Life and Death), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2002).