Artist Talk: Laia Abril

During the conversation between Laia Abril and Anna Tellgren, Laia Abril develops her thoughts on what it is like to work with difficult and painful subjects, why art is so important to us in troubled times, and about reflections linked to the artist’s own practice. She will also talk about Emily Jacir and Teresa Margolles’ participation in the exhibition, “What Remains – Laia Abril meets Emily Jacir and Teresa Margolles” at Moderna Museet.

In her long-term project “A History of Misogyny”, Laia Abril (born 1986) has been collecting various issues around topics such as abortion, rape, mass hysteria, menstruation and femicide. In “What Remains” the second part of the project, “On Rape” (2022), is shown. In the work, women’s testimonies about rape are reproduced through a series of photographic portraits of clothing and objects connected to the assaults.

The exhibition presents Laia Abril’s work in dialogue with the artists Emily Jacir and Teresa Margolles, whose works deal with trauma caused by violence, murder and war. All the three artists work with research-based methods and use different types of archives and existing material, often in the form of photography and film, but also interviews. The works present personal stories about specific events as symptoms of larger social, historical and political injustices.

Laia Abril

Laia Abril is a Catalan artist, active mainly in Barcelona. She works investigatory with photography, text, video and sound. Her work tells intimate stories that reveal hidden and uncomfortable realities. With a particular focus on biopolitics and gender equality, she explores how structural violence manifests itself in individual’s lives. She is a trained journalist and participated in the residency program at FABRICA, Benetton Communication Research Centre in Treviso, where she worked for five years as a researcher, photo editor and photographer for COLORS Magazine. Her art projects are presented in the form of installations and publications. Her books include the award-winning “On Abortion” (2018), “On Rape” (2022) and the most recent, “On Mass Hysteria” (2024). In 2023, she was awarded the National Photography Prize of the Spanish Ministry of Culture.