PHOTO: Laia Abril-On Rape And Institutional Failure
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: C/O Berlin Archive
Laia Abril in her first solo exhibition in Germany presents her broad-ranging, research-based work “On Rape – And Institutional Failure”, which uses an assemblage of found and original photographs, reports, quotations, videos, and artifacts to explore the structures that make rape possible. Working across temporal periods, cultural practices, and media, Abril reveals the normalization of misogynist attitudes and behaviors in society and politics but does not resort to explicit depictions of sexualized violence. A 2018 case of rape in Spain occasioned Abril’s investigation. Occurring at the height of the #MeToo movement, the incident set off country-wide protests. Abril was inspired to create “On Rape and Institutional Failure” by the ‘Wolf Pack’, a high-profile legal case in Pamplona, northern Spain, in 2016, that involved the gang rape of an 18-year-old woman by five men and the victim’s subsequent public shaming. When they were ultimately charged, it was not for rape, but merely for sexual harassment, which carries a lighter sentence. The exhibition, and accompanying book, subvert the victim-blaming narrative, and instead examine the complicity of law enforcement, healthcare services and religious groups in protecting perpetrators and in cultivating the pervasiveness of ‘rape culture’. “On Rape – And Institutional Failure” is the second chapter in the artist’s long-term project “A History of Misogyny”, in which she responds to manifold forms of systemic violence against women. Abril succeeds in allowing a deep empathy for victims of sexualized violence while inviting viewers to consider the complex relationship between experience, image, and language, as well as the limits of depicting trauma. The artist uses a moving political narrative to counter the feeling of silencing often experienced around the subject while simultaneously appealing to society’s sense of responsibility. Abril’s research-based practice makes her one of the most important next-generation artists working with archives, written testimonies, and original photographs today. She uses multilayered narratives to make visible complex and suppressed taboo themes today. 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”. 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, from the series “On Rape – And Institutional Failure”, © Laia Abril, Courtesy the artist, C/O Berlin & Les filles du calvaire-Paris
Info: C/O Berlin, Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22–24, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 27/-22/5/2024, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-20:00, www.co-berlin.org/
