PHOTO:Laia Abril-On Rape

Laia Abril is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, text, video and sound. After graduating from college with a degree in Journalism she moved to New York to focus on photography where she decided to start telling intimate stories that raise uneasy and hidden realities related with sexuality, eating disorders and gender equality. In 2009, she enrolled in a 5-years artist residency at Fabrica, the Benetton Research Centre in Treviso, where she worked as a researcher, photo editor and staff photographer at Colors Magazine.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Foam Archive

Laia Abril won the fourteenth edition of the Foam Paul Huf Award this year with her long term project “A History of Misogyny”  This prize is organised by Foam and annually awarded to a talented young photographer, by an independent, international jury. It consists of a cash prize of €20,000,- and a solo exhibition at Foam. With her project “The History of Misogyny” Laia Abril wishes to bring attention to current social-cultural topics. In 2016 her first chapter in this Series “On Abortion” was published. With “On Rape – A History of Misogyny, Chapter Two”, the artist presents a series of conceptual portraits and testimonies that together symbolise the current impunity of institutional rape. The project got triggered by a local news item in 2018 about five men who had raped an 18 year old woman, and were released by the Spanish court after they had been convicted for abuse instead of rape. This event was the starting point of the biggest feminist protest in the countries history. With the rise of the #Metoo movement, Abril tried to understand why institutional structures of justice, law and policy were failing the survivors to a point where they seemed to be encouraging the perpetrators by preserving certain power dynamics and social norms. She researched the origin of rape culture and made a series of metaphors from texts and audiovisual installations. As the artist says “By looking back to history, I could identify gender-based stereotypes and myths, prejudices and misconceptions, that have prevailed and perpetuated the rape culture. Through a painstaking research on miscarriages of justice and victim-blaming attitudes, this work evokes how still today society blames victims of sexual assault and normalizes sexual violence”. The project “On Rape” consists of a set of photographs, objects and testimonies. The artist designed the exhibition like an onsite installation. The elements are interconnected and don’t give us a linear or chronological approach. Instead, it gives us several levels of reading. By creating bridges between history, places and cultures, Laia Abril reminds us the universality of this drama. In her first chapter “On Abortion” (2016) 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, she draws on the past to highlight the long, continuous erosion of women’s reproductive rights through to the 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 long remained invisible.

Photo: Laia Abril, Cilicio, from series Punishment, On Rape, 2019, © Laia Abril, Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire-Paris

Info: Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, Duration: 6/11/2020-10/1/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.foam.org