Mexican artist Teresa Margolies, who visited Israel last week, brings to mind the women in Pedro Almodovar's films, not only because of her black hair and her sparkling dark eyes, but mainly for the power she radiates and her ability to survive.

Tomorrow, an exhibition by the artist will open at the Herzliya Museum. Margolies, 45, is the daughter of a Spanish Republican and a Mexican Indian woman, and is an artist and a surgeon at the Forensic Medicine Institute in Mexico City.

At the museum Margolies is showing, among other of her creations, a long string made up of 35 threads of different lengths that are tied to one another. These are bits that remained after sewing up cadavers at the morgue. Each string represents an anonymous victim who died an unnatural death - a man who was murdered, a girl who was raped, a drug addict who died of an overdose - each with his or her own story.

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One cannot figure out the origin of the threads just by looking at them. Only after reading the accompanying text, essential to understanding Margolies' work, does the observer complete the missing details. Suddenly one sees on the string, which initially looks like a familiar museum means of warning visitors not to get too close, stains of a crimson color and traces of fluids. The minimalist arena becomes a murder scene. It's almost possible to sense the odor, to feel the abhorrence.

In another room Margolies is showing two video works. "Car Wash" documents an activity she undertook with two street kids in Mexico, who were given buckets of water with which they washed cars. On the adjacent wall is screened a short film of the washing of a cadaver on an operating table. Here the text on the wall creates the link between the water that remained after the washing of the cadavers, and that used for washing the cars.

Water mixed with the bodily fluids of victims is a recurring motif in Margolies' work. In one instance the water is dripping down from the ceiling and forming a puddle on the floor of the exhibition space. In another, the water is used to mix concrete and make it into a table. However, it is not just water and threads that Margolies uses in her work, but also bodily remains themselves. In an exhibition in Frankfurt, for example, she covered one of the walls with what looks like an abstract painting. The material that created the seductive and deceptive work, however, is human fat.

The gap between the sensational materials and the poetic, aesthetic result is parallel to the gap between the place she works - where cadavers are dissected - and her attitude toward each of the bodies she examines. The work is entirely technical, as she defines it: "At first an external examination of the body is performed - to locate wounds, abrasions, bullet entries - and then we open up the body to discover the cause of death. We move from the right side to the left and then from the bottom up, removing all the organs, weighing them, returning them and sewing the body back up."

It is very tempting to define Margolies as another sensationalist contemporary artist who makes immoral use of difficult materials, but after meeting her, it is easy to understand that she is doing this out of a sense of mission - a desire to make the dead part of everyday life again.

"It is important to me to continue the existence of those who have been murdered. I see this as a kind of immortalization," she says. An example of this is the installation at the Herzliya Museum.

"At the end of a day's work, threads in all kinds of sizes are left on the autopsy room floor, which have been used in the bodies of men, women and children. All of them died a violent death," explains Margolies. "These threads get thrown away. I have given them respect. To pick them up from the floor is to pick up the body, to remember, even though they do not have names and or other identifying signs."

'Barometer of society'

What is the source of her attraction to such a difficult subject?

"I'm a photographer and at first I was attracted to this from the standpoint of an artist, like Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt," she says. "During my studies and afterward, when I started to work at the morgue, I realized that this place is a barometer of society. The social situation is expressed in the identity of those who came into the morgue - their background - and the reasons for the death: rape, murder, robbery. The extent of the activity at the morgue reflects the state of the country."

So in fact that place is a vehicle for social action.

Margolies: "Yes, I try to visit the morgue in every country where I exhibit, and there are big differences. I'm interested in what people die from, how they die, in what condition the corpse arrives. For example, one of the differences between the cities of Guadalajara and Juarez is reflected in the causes for the death of an adolescent girl. In Guadalajara it is suicide and in Juarez they come in after they have been raped and murdered. In Western cities that I have been to, such as in France and Spain, most of the people whose bodies come to the morgue are immigrants. In Spain, death caused by violence has gone way up. These are immigrants from South America. You can see differences within a few years. Even during different times of the year. For example, in 2005-06 there were many suicides in Guadalajara. This has become a national problem."

Could this be because of the economic situation during that period?

"I am not looking for answers. I am an artist and I express this by plastic means. I have given them public expression. I took all the suicide notes, I read them, I chose a number of sentences and displayed them on the facades of six abandoned movie theaters in the city. This was written in the same font they use for film posters and also the content was reminiscent of that. For example, one said: 'See you again, says the ugly girl you have always hated.' People expected that films would be shown there, but these were completely abandoned places. These spaces had told so many stories; this was the last story they told."

In another work that Margolies did in the public sphere, she handed out cards shaped like credit cards to drug addicts, on which there were pictures of people who had been murdered. "While they were grinding up the cocaine and sniffing it, they realized that on the card there was a picture of a dead person, and they were deterred," she says. To this day she scatters the cards in places where there are drug-users.

Is there not an ethical and moral problem in using pictures of dead people or suicide notes?

"No. The pictures of the people who were murdered appeared in the press and the project itself was funded by a grant from the governments of Mexico and Colombia. I also don't use terms like morality. I talk about social reflection, about pain and loss. I displayed the work with the posters in a society that is creating a phenomenon of suicides and therefore is also responsible for it to a large extent. Usually the families of the victims remain alone in their mourning. I give them the sense they are not alone, and help the family talk about their loss through art, in a public way."

It is possible to see in Margolies' work a continuation of the body art that began in the 1970. For her, the presence of the body has been replaced by what remains of it, and has turned into a presence of ghosts. It is also correct to associate her with the preoccupation with "the shocking" that has characterized contemporary Western art since the 1990s - with excretions, with what is despised and with everything that "isn't appropriate."

Margolies talks about her creations in the contexts of artist Christian Boltanski, who deals with issues of memory and time, of Georges Bataille's take on the body as a tool, and also of art in pre-Columbian culture: the burial rites of the Aztec and Maya, and their attitudes toward the dead.

"But art doesn't operate alone, in a closed field. It is part of a broad cultural field," she explains. "I'm more interested in what happens in the street. Many of my works are intended for the street and remain there. For example, in France and in Brazil, I have left tables made of concrete mixed with water from the morgue. In Colombia I invited people whose relatives had been violently murdered to bury their possessions beneath paving stones on the street. The possessions are still there and they know this."

Another interesting project, this time moving from the street into the museum space, came in the wake of the murder of artist Luis Miguel Suro. Margolies brought into the museum a bloodstained section of the floor where the artist fell when he was murdered. This work can be viewed as an alternative proposal to the way in which the place where Yitzhak Rabin was murdered has been preserved, cleansed of any signs of the event and transformed into a defined and protected space.

But in the end, the materials from the morgue are profoundly sublimated. The language of the work is minimalist, aesthetic and artistic, free of any signs of the street. "It is important to me that people not know in advance what it is they are seeing. That they first experience the beauty and the seduction and only afterward understand the context. Provocation doesn't interest me," Margolies says.

Perhaps this is a strategy. Another way to present a sensational issue at a time when everything seems to be sensational.