Teresa Margolles

Glasgow Sculpture Studios
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art
April 20th-June 12th 2012
4 stars
Life’s a riot in Teresa Margolles’ new work for Glasgow Sculpture 
Studios’ new space in Glasgow’s old Whiskey Bond building, which 
sources a photographic archive in the now decaying Mexican border town 
of Ciudad Juarez alongside a new piece mined from frontline Croydon 
during the 2011 London riots.

In the small Project Gallery, three projectors quick-fire off more than 
6000 images by Luis Alvarado that charts a historical landscape from 
the 1960s to the 1980s peopled by heroic masked wrestlers, politicians, 
wedding parties and street corner night owls, all captured in the 
throes of a thousand social rituals.

In the main room, the phrase ‘A DIAMOND FOR THE CROWN’ is carved across 
the back wall like an epitaph. On another wall in a glass box sits the 
tiniest and loveliest of diamonds sourced from burnt wood and carbon 
 from the riots and painstakingly buffed into beautiful life by 
Margolles. That something so sparklingly serene was born of a 
disenfranchised energy feels how a revolution is meant to turn out. 

The List magazine, April 2012

ends