London’s fourth plinth artwork celebrates the transgender community
A new artwork has been installed on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square depicting over 700 masks of faces belonging to transgender and non-binary people. The piece has been created by Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist whose previous training as a forensic pathologist has shaped her interest in death and its causes in society.
Titled Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant), it pays tribute to the murdered transgender singer Karla La Borrada, emphasising the importance of celebrating marginalised gender identities.
According to Margolles (via The Guardian), the life masks pay “tribute to her and all the other people who were killed for reasons of hate. But, above all, to those who live on, to the new generations who will defend the power to freely choose to live with dignity.”
She added, “Instead of doing one piece in her memory, I wanted to do something to represent the whole trans community – a collective piece about that community hugging her.”
Margolles was commissioned to do the piece in 2021, which marks the 15th artwork to be installed on the iconic plinth. Initially designed in 1841 to hold a statue of William IV, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the plinth began to be used to display a specially commissioned piece of art. The first was Ecce Homo by Mark Wallinger.
More recently, Trafalgar Square has been home to The End by Heather Phillipson, a giant whipped cream sculpture topped with a cherry, a fly, and a drone, or Samson Kambalu’s Antelope, which explored colonialism’s enduring legacy in Africa.
With Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant), Ekow Eshun, the chair of the plinth’s commissioning group, hopes that it will “unite the trans community around the world.”
“Every face has a story attached,” Margolles explains, stating that she is ready for the British weather to shape the appearance of the masks over time. “They will fade and transform. It’s a natural process. What interests me, and the reason why I’m not displaying the outside of the casts, is because it would be breaking the soul of it, which is the face of the person. Like this, each cast will react to the elements in its own way, according to the organic materials left on the mask.”
Margolles’ artwork will be on display until 2026, when Tschabalala Self’s Lady in Blue will next be installed on the plinth.
