Teresa Margolles, La promesa (The Promise) (fragment), 2012. 22 tons of rubble, remains of a demolished house from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, dimensions variable. Installation view, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017. Collection of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, DGAV-UNAM, Mexico City. © 2026 Teresa Margolles. In the fall of 2026, MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art will present the first US large-scale exhibition of Teresa Margolles (Mexican, b. 1963), featuring several room-sized installations and a new commission. Trained as a forensic pathologist and a photographer, Margolles has created work that examines the implications of transnational violence, with particular attention to the US-Mexico border. Across mediums, her works trace disappearances, femicides, political displacements, and societal neglect through methodical research, site-responsive interventions, and a radical rethinking of the memorial. The exhibition’s centerpiece is La promesa (2012), a monumental barrier made from tons of rubble that the artist disassembled from a home abandoned by a family, in Ciudad Juárez. Margolles’s artworks bring pressing systemic issues into public view, materializing the ways violence permeates everyday life with feelings of loss.
A concurrent presentation at The Museum of Modern Art is on view beginning September 17, 2026, titled Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene) .
Teresa Margolles
MoMA PS1