A TRAVÉS [2022 EXH RECORD], 2007-2022

For over twenty-five years, Teresa Margolles has investigated the social and aesthetic dimensions of violence and marginality. Her work most often involves collecting material samples that index the mortal consequence of social exclusion. Working in close collaboration with her subjects, Margolles' fieldwork-driven artmaking most often results in object-based interventions within the architectures of civic and cultural institutions.

For A TRAVÉS, the windows of James Cohan's Tribeca gallery are covered by the sweat of undocumented migrants from Mexico, Central America, and South America, who live and work in New York. To execute this action, the residual bodily fluids from t-shirts worn previously by these individuals will be smudged onto the panes of glass. For the duration of the exhibition, the windows' surfaces will be coated entirely by this semi-transparent fluid: material evidence of the resolute bodily presence—the condition of being alive, in itself deemed "illegal"—of people precluded from access to systems of social care. By intervening into the architecture of the gallery, the work serves to expose the social and economic structures within our capitalist system of value that enable such marginality and exclude them from the social imaginary.

Once the intervention is complete, the t-shirts will each be cast into respective cubes of cement and installed within the space. This work, whose title translates in English to "through," is a continuation of a larger series Margolles has developed since 2007, involving the use of sweat from subjugated individuals to cover windows within arts venues. Most recently, Margolles created a work focused on the sweat of Venezuelan subjects of forced migration that crossed the Simón Bolívar bridge to neighboring Colombia in 2017.