Semefo benito juarez biography
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The Bullfighter, Semefo, Juarez, Mexico
Maker Bailléres, Jaime Mexican, b. 1960
Date1995
MediumInkjet print
Dimensionsimage: 14 in x 9 5/16 in; mat: 20 in x 16 in; paper: 16 1/2 in x 13 in
Credit LineGift of the artist
Object number2011:117
About the ArtistJaime Bailléres worked as a photojournalist from 1990 to 2000 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, directly across the border from El Paso, TX. He is among a group of photographers in Juarez whose self-made mission is to document and expose the extreme violence and poverty in this border city of almost two million. These photographers often shoot with rationed film and earn only $50 to $80 per week from the half-dozen newspapers who employ them. Bailléres finds and documents murder victims, happenings on the border, and daily life in the shantytowns and on the street. In Bailléres's words, “we are like firemen, only here we fight fires with our bare hands.”Bailléres was born in Delicias, Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1960. He started p
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Teresa Margolles
Mexican artist
Teresa Margolles (born 1963 in Culiacán) is a Mexican conceptual artist, photographer, videographer, and performance artist. As an artist she researches the social causes and consequences of death.[1][2]
Margolles communicates observations from the morgue in her home city, Mexico City, and other morgues located in Latin America, as well as the extended emotional distress and social consequences that occur as product of death by murder. While working around the topic of the body, her work extends to the families of the victims, the remaining living bodies that witness the death of a loved one.[3]
The main medium of her work comes from the morgues themselves, which she transforms into sensory experiences that provoke a feeling of memory to the audience. Margolles finds particularly remarkable how the activity inside the morgues reflects the truth from the outside. In the case of Mexico City, she observes that the ma
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CONTENT WARNING:graphic descriptions of art installations and construction. ie sexual violence, murder, blood.
Teresa Margolles, born in 1963, is an artist from Mexico City. Teresa is considered a conceptual artist, with a focus on the impacts of violence and death, specifically in her home country of Mexico, and Latin America as a whole.
In her early adulthood, she went to school and studied to become a forensic pathologist. She then worked in the morgue, and witnessed the ways in which bodies, and the lives lost resulting in these bodies, were unnoticed. The violence of her home and surroundings became the subject of much of her artistic work. Margolles went on to create an artists’ collective named SEMEFO in the 1990s.
“When I was working with SEMEFO I was very interested in what was happening inside the morgue and the situations that were occurring, let’s say, a few meters outside the morgue, among family members and relatives. But Mexico has chan