Exhibitions
Laia Abril's cry resonates at the Moderna Museet with What Remains
Laia Abril, Emily Jacir and Teresa Margolles: three essential voices in a temporary exhibition until January 18, 2026.
Laia Abril combines photography, text, video and sound in a work marked by exhaustive research and the desire to provoke critical reflection in the audience. From September 6 to January 18, 2026, Abril's work arrives in Stockholm at the Moderna Museet with Laia Abril, together with Emily Jacir and Teresa Margolles with What remains .
Moderna Museet is Sweden's leading museum of modern and contemporary art. Located on the island of Skeppsholmen, in the heart of Stockholm, it opened in 1958 and has been housed in a building designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo since 1998. Temporary exhibitions constantly renew the museum's story.
As part of her exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Laia Abril highlighted two creators who have been a source of inspiration for her and with whom she wished to establish a dialogue: Emily Jacir and Teresa Margolles. Both, like Abril, develop an artistic practice based on research and work with archives, photography, film and interviews, exploring social and political issues from a critical and committed perspective.
In the exhibition What Remains , the creations of the three artists are intertwined in a common dialogue where resistance to multiple forms of oppression, social commitment and the power of storytelling as a tool of memory and transformation emerge as common threads.
In A History of Misogyny , Laia Abril constructs a visual and critical cartography of the beliefs, structures and systems that have historically contributed to the oppression of women. Through a methodology that combines research, archiving and artistic representation, the author addresses such fundamental issues as abortion, collective hysteria, menstruation and femicide, revealing the persistence of harms and control mechanisms that cross societies and eras.
Within this vast project, the series On Rape (2022) is part of the research. In this chapter, presented in the exhibition What Remains , Abril focuses on sexual violence and the institutional and cultural structures that perpetuate impunity. The work is built on real testimonies of women who have suffered rape, which are symbolically materialized in a series of conceptual photographs of items of clothing and objects linked to the abuse. This shift from the personal story to the object generates a space of reflection and discomfort, the intimate and the social are intertwined to make visible the scope of an often silenced problem.
With this approach, Abril not only documents a traumatic event, but also questions collective responsibility and challenges the viewer, inviting them to recognize the power structures and cultural discourses that sustain violence against women.
Emily Jacir enters the Moderna Museet with Letter to a friend from 2019 and Teresa Margolles does so with Plancha from 2010/2025. In What Remains , the works of Laia Abril, Emily Jacir and Teresa Margolles intertwine in a conversation marked by resistance, commitment and political vision. Their works bring to light silenced stories that reveal injustice and abuse, while opening spaces for questions about collective responsibility, the capacity for empathy and the role of art as a place of memory, dialogue and possible healing.
