Under “natural” circumstances, the average woman would get pregnant about 15 times in her life, resulting in ten births. Seven of those babies would survive childhood. For centuries, people have searched for ways to delay or terminate pregnancy. Today, safe and efficient means of abortion exist, yet women around the world continue to use ancient, illegal or risky home methods. Every year, 47,000 women around the world die due to botched abortions.
Laia Abril’s new long-term project A History of Misogyny is a visual research undertaken through historical and contemporary comparisons. In her first chapter, On Abortion, Abril documents and conceptualises the dangers and damages caused by women’s lack of legal, safe and free access to abortion. Continuing with her painstaking research methodology, Abril draws on the past to highlight the long, continuous erosion of women’s reproductive rights to present-day. Her collection of visual, audio and textual evidence weaves a net of questions about ethics and morality, and reveals a staggering series of social triggers, stigmas, and taboos around abortion that have been invisible until now.
Laia Abril (Barcelona, 1986) is a photographer, visual artist and bookmaker who studied Journalism in Barcelona, and photography in New York; she enrolled FABRICA’s artist residency where she worked at COLORS Magazine as a creative editor and staff photographer for 5 years. Her projects have been shown internationally. Her work is held in private and public collections as Musée de l’Elysée and Winterthur Museum in Switzerland, Madame Figaro-Arles and FRAC in France or MNAC in Barcelona. Her work has been recognized with several nominations. Recently she has been awarded with Fotopres Grant, Premio Revelación PhotoEspaña and the Prix Madame Figaro for her exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2016, A History of Misogyny, chapter One: On Abortion. Curator: Ángel Luis González, PhotoIreland Foundation (I. Cervantes press-release)