At the Scene, Teresa Margolles Arrives at MoMA PS1

A video at MoMA PS1 runs for 296 minutes. The action is small and it repeats. People crouch on city pavement and scrub the spot where someone was shot.

Hyperallergic's Alex Santana, reviewing the show, says each scene opens with a title card. It gives the victim's name, age, date of death and address. One card reads "victim shot while accidentally trying to enter the wrong apartment."

The piece is *El agua de la ciudad, Dallas* (2016), and it is part of *Teresa Margolles: En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene)*. The show opened September 24 and runs through February 8, 2027, at 22-25 Jackson Avenue in Long Island City.

It is October, the stretch of the calendar when the city dresses up its fear and parades it down Sixth Avenue. Margolles offers the plain version. No costume, no punchline.

The Artist and the Rooms

Margolles was born in Mexico in 1963 and, per MoMA PS1, trained as a forensic pathologist and a photographer. This is the first large-scale US museum exhibition of her work. The press office describes sculptures, photographs and video made over three decades, spread across the museum's third-floor galleries, with several room-sized installations and a new commission.

Hyperallergic puts her origins in Culiacán and her base in Mexico City. Her subject is violence along the US-Mexico border, especially Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, though the review notes the work reaches well past it.

The Wall and the Water

The centerpiece is *La promesa* (2012), a monumental barrier built from rubble. The material came from a house in Ciudad Juárez that was demolished and pulverized over 11 days in June 2012, according to the museum. Its description gives the weight as 14 tons, while a caption on the same page says 13. Either way, the material is a home, taken apart and stacked into a wall.

The material is a home, taken apart and stacked into a wall.

The museum notes that *La promesa* is activated daily at 3 p.m.

Then there is the air. In *Aire (Air)* (2003), humidifiers release water into a room. Hyperallergic says the water was collected at sites of violence in New York City. Visitors breathe it in.

That piece follows an older one. *Vaporization* (2001) filled a room with vapor from water used in a morgue. Hyperallergic notes it was first shown at MoMA PS1 in 2002, so the work has been here before. Curator Inés Katzenstein told the press preview that the beauty of the fog is no longer needed, the review reports. The breathing goes on without it.

A smaller screen carries *La nieve (The Snow)* (2015). A man in Staten Island shovels snow in front of an altar to Eric Garner, who was killed by police in 2014. The review describes a small rectangle of street, cleared and marked.

Santana's review asks what formal restraint accomplishes in an age of violent excess. It frames Margolles's spare gestures as a kind of minimalism, and it is worth reading before you go.

Across the River

The show has a second address. MoMA is presenting a concurrent installation, *Aproximación al lugar de los hechos (Approaching the Scene)*, on West 53rd Street. Per the museum's press office, it opened September 25 and stays up into 2027.

Both are co-organized by Ana Janevski and Inés Katzenstein of MoMA, with Chloë Courtney and Julia Detchon. The Queens show is the large one. Midtown is the short, sharp companion.

For another MoMA exhibition about what an object can do to a viewer, see Books That Bite.

What to Know Before You Go

MoMA PS1 is at 22-25 Jackson Avenue in Long Island City, Queens. The show runs through February 8, 2027, and the museum lists free admission for all. Check its visit page for hours before you head out.

*La promesa* is activated daily at 3 p.m., so plan around it.

Go in the afternoon, then walk out into the early dark on Jackson Avenue. The scrubbing on the screen stops. The street outside keeps going.