What remains after a violent event is over?
A building may be demolished. A street may be cleaned. Evidence may disappear. Families may leave. Yet traces of those events can remain embedded in objects, architecture, soil, water, and collective memory.
This fall, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles brings that question to the center of New York’s contemporary art landscape with a major dual presentation at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and MoMA PS1.
Teresa Margolles: En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene) opens September 24, 2026, at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, while a related presentation, Teresa Margolles: Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene), opens September 25 at MoMA in Manhattan. Together, the exhibitions constitute the first large-scale US museum presentation of Margolles’s work.
From Forensic Evidence to Contemporary Art
Margolles’s artistic practice is inseparable from her background.
Trained as both a forensic pathologist and photographer, she has spent decades investigating the physical and social traces left by death and violence. Since the 1990s, her work has incorporated materials connected to sites of loss—including soil, architectural fragments, shattered glass, blood, and water.
Rather than treating these materials simply as evidence, Margolles transforms them into artworks that ask viewers to confront what official narratives, urban development, or social indifference can leave behind.
Her work has repeatedly focused on interconnected histories between Mexico and the United States, including migration, gender-based violence, drug-related violence, displacement, and systemic neglect.
The result is an artistic language that can be visually restrained while carrying an intense historical weight.
La promesa: Architecture After Loss
At MoMA PS1, one of the central works is La promesa (The Promise), originally created in 2012.
The monumental installation uses approximately 22 tons of rubble from a demolished house in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The house had been abandoned by a family before being dismantled and pulverized.
Margolles transformed those remains into an artwork that makes architecture function as a carrier of memory.
The rubble is no longer simply construction waste. It becomes a physical record of a place, a family, a neighborhood, and the circumstances surrounding disappearance and displacement.
At MoMA PS1, La promesa will be activated daily at 3 p.m., giving the work a recurring temporal dimension within the exhibition.
The installation asks viewers to consider what happens when the physical environment associated with a person’s life disappears.
Can demolition erase memory?
Margolles’s work suggests that material traces can continue to carry histories long after the original structure is gone.
The Border as a Space of Memory
Margolles’s work frequently crosses geographical and political boundaries.
The US-Mexico border appears not simply as a line on a map but as a complicated landscape shaped by movement, separation, violence, labor, migration, and memory.
That transnational dimension is central to the MoMA and MoMA PS1 presentation.
Rather than presenting violence as an isolated event, Margolles examines the systems and environments surrounding it. Her artworks connect individual experiences to broader social conditions while maintaining attention to the people whose stories can otherwise become statistics or disappear entirely from public memory.
This makes the exhibitions particularly relevant to New York, a city whose own identity has been shaped by migration and transnational movement.
Water, Heat, and the Materiality of Memory
At MoMA, Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene) focuses on recent incidents in Minnesota, California, and Texas.
The installation combines heated metal plates with water infused with residue collected from locations where people were murdered.
Drops of water fall onto the plates at regular intervals. The contact produces a sharp hissing sound and visible steam.
Over time, the metal plates rust.
The work therefore becomes a physical process rather than a static memorial. Water evaporates. Metal changes. Surfaces deteriorate.
The cycle evokes disappearance while simultaneously making disappearance visible.
MoMA describes the installation as a space for contemplation and public dialogue about the effects of violence.
The Memorial Without the Monument
Traditional monuments often attempt to preserve memory through permanence.
Margolles takes another route.
Her materials are fragile, unstable, or transformed by time. Water evaporates. Metal corrodes. Buildings become rubble. Photographs document places that may no longer exist in the same form.
This instability becomes part of the meaning.
The memorial is not necessarily an imposing object designed to last unchanged for centuries. It can instead be a process that requires attention.
The viewer has to listen, watch, remember, and recognize the material evidence of something that has already happened.
In this sense, Margolles’s work shifts the question from “How do we commemorate?” to “What happens when we fail to remember?”
Memory Across Two Museums
The decision to present Margolles simultaneously at MoMA PS1 and MoMA expands that investigation across two distinct New York spaces.
At PS1, visitors encounter large-scale installations, photographs, video, and a new commission across the museum’s expansive third-floor galleries.
At MoMA, the focused collection-gallery presentation brings her recent work into dialogue with the museum’s collection and its broader history of contemporary art.
The two presentations are co-organized by Ana Janevski, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance, and Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute at MoMA, together with Chloë Courtney and former curatorial associate Julia Detchon.
The institutional pairing is significant because Margolles’s practice itself refuses easy separation.
Personal memory intersects with political history. Local events connect to transnational systems. Physical materials carry social histories.
Art as Witness
Margolles does not make violence visually spectacular.
Instead, she often works through absence.
A demolished home.
Water from a site of violence.
A fragment of architecture.
A sound.
A stain.
A changing surface.
These materials require the viewer to reconstruct the missing story.
That approach makes her work especially challenging within the museum environment. The gallery is traditionally associated with preservation, while Margolles frequently brings materials associated with destruction and disappearance into that protected space.
The contradiction is productive.
What does it mean to preserve evidence of something that has already been lost?
And what responsibility does a museum assume when it places such traces before a public audience?
New York and the Geography of Remembering
For New York audiences, the exhibitions arrive within a city where questions of migration, identity, inequality, displacement, and memory are constantly visible.
Margolles’s work does not offer a simple historical narrative. Instead, it encourages viewers to consider how memory is distributed—and whose memories receive institutional attention.
The physical movement between MoMA in Midtown Manhattan and MoMA PS1 in Queens also gives the project an unexpected geographic dimension.
The exhibitions occupy different parts of the city while examining interconnected histories across national borders.
The result is not one exhibition repeated in two locations.
It is a conversation between places, materials, and histories.
The Trace That Remains
Teresa Margolles’s work ultimately returns to a deceptively simple idea: violence does not end when an event ends.
Its effects can remain in families, neighborhoods, buildings, landscapes, and objects.
By collecting and transforming those traces, Margolles creates artworks that resist disappearance.
At MoMA and MoMA PS1, the museum becomes not merely a place where art is displayed, but a place where difficult histories can be materially encountered.
En el lugar de los hechos and Aproximación al lugar de los hechos ask audiences to look closely at what remains after the headline, after the crime scene, after the demolition, and after the official record.
The evidence may be quiet.
The memory may be incomplete.
But the trace remains.
And sometimes, that trace is enough to make a forgotten history visible again.
Teresa Margolles: En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene)
MoMA PS1
September 24, 2026–February 8, 2027
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Teresa Margolles: Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene)
The Museum of Modern Art, Gallery 212
September 25, 2026–Summer 2027
11 West 53rd Street, New York
