Faces of 726 trans and nonbinary people adorn London’s Trafalgar Square
An artwork featuring the plaster face casts of hundreds of transgender people went on display in London’s Trafalgar Square. Artist Teresa Margolles calls the piece "Mil Veces un Instante."
LONDON — An artwork featuring the plaster face casts of hundreds of transgender people went on display Wednesday in London’s Trafalgar Square, where their features will be worn away by London’s wind and rain over the next 18 months.
Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ “Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)” is a 3.6-ton cube covered in face masks of 726 trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people. It’s the latest artwork placed atop the “Fourth Plinth,” a large stone pedestal in the central London square.
Margolles, who trained as a forensic pathologist and once worked in a morgue, has used blood and material from crime scenes in artworks exploring death and conflict.
The new sculpture evokes a Tzompantli, a rack used in Mesoamerican civilizations to display the skulls of captured enemies and sacrifice victims. It pays tribute to one of the artist’s friends, a transgender woman named Karla who was killed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 2015. The crime remains unsolved.
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