Laia Abril on her work “On Rape”

Laia Abril, On Rape, 2022

Laia Abril: “On Rape” is the second chapter of my project “A History of Misogyny”. It began in Spain, at a moment when we were collectively suffering from the outrage of institutional failure. In 2016, a judge—after watching 96 seconds of video recorded by five men while they were gang-raping an 18-year-old woman—decided that she wasn’t resisting enough. Because she was frozen and had her eyes shut, he convicted them of sexual abuse rather than rape.
 
This case sparked the largest feminist protest in the country’s history, demanding both a rewriting of Spain’s sexual assault laws and an increase in the sentence.
 
The series, I’m displaying at Moderna Museet, was conceived to shift the focus—and the pressure—away from the survivors and toward the institutions that have historically upheld and perpetuated rape culture. The dresses in the photographs do not only represent the individuals I met, but also the millions of survivors before and after them. And symbolically, they embody the very institutions that failed them: the church, the military, the school, and the institution of marriage.
 
These structures of rape culture not only failed to prevent assaults, they often created the conditions that enabled them. And when survivors spoke out, they were frequently silenced, dismissed, or disbelieved. The choice of a life-size format invites viewers to confront their own proximity to the issue, turning the installation into a space of collective accountability. On another level, the testimonies—an equally important part of the pieces—focus on the struggle and resilience toward this societal failure after the violence they suffered, rather than on describing the crime itself.
 
Other series in the project trace the origins of rape culture—through laws, myths, and long-standing misconceptions such as victim-shaming—and draw connections to contemporary cases where these beliefs still persist. You can find them on the book. To me, understanding that there was an origin to those beliefs gave me some sort of hope.