9th May, 6PM, Zoom, £3 / £5
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Laia Abril (1986) is a research-based 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 to sexuality, eating disorders, and gender equality. In 2009, she enrolled in the artist residency at FABRICA, the Benetton Research Centre in Treviso, where she worked as a researcher, photo editor, and staff photographer at Colors Magazine for 5 years.

Abril’s projects are produced across platforms such as installations, books, web docs, and films. Her work has been shown wildely and published internationally and is held in private collections and museums, such as Centre Pompidou and FRAC in France, Musée de l’Elysée and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, MoCP in Chicago, and MNAC and FotoColectania in Barcelona.

She has published several books —Thinspiration (2012), Tediousphilia (Musée de l’Elysée, 2014) and The Epilogue (Dewi Lewis, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First Book Award, Kassel PhotoBook Festival, Photo España Best Book Award and was referred to as “a masterpiece of a photobook“ by critic Jörg Colberg. In 2016, she published Lobismuller (RM Verlag) which was the first recipient of the Images Book award at Festival Images, where was also first exhibited in Vevey, Switzerland the same year.

After completing her five-year project On Eating Disorders, Abril embarked on her trilogy, A History of Misogyny. Its first chapter On Abortion was exhibited at The Rencontres d’Arles in 2016; and was the first recipient of the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro, produced with the support of the Fotopress Grant and nominated for the ICP-Infinity Award, Foam Paul Huf among others. The show has been exhibited in more than 13 countries, including at The Photographers’ Gallery (London), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb), el Centro de la Imagen (Mexico), the Museum of Sex (New York), and was the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal in 2019.

The book On Abortion and the repercussions of lack of access (Dewi Lewis, 2018) was the winner of the Aperture Best Book Award in 2018 as well as a finalist for the prestigious Deutsche Börse in 2019. Abril is currently about to launch the publication of the second chapter: On Rape and Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022) —a project produced with the support of the Visionary Award and the Magnum Foundation grant. The presentation will take place during the exhibition in London, organized by the V&A Museum and Photoworks and hosted by Copeland Gallery in November 2022.

At-present, she is working on the third chapter: On Mass Hysteria —nominee of the Swiss Prix Elysée, co-produced by the Photo Elysée (Lausanne), Le Bal (Paris), and the Finnish Museum of Helsinki, and due 2023. Abril is currently based between Switzerland —where she is lecturer of Visual Narratives at Camera Arts (HSLU) and Barcelona.

Abril is represented by the Parisian gallery Les Filles du Calvaire.

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www.LaiaAbril.com