Endometriosis

Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory disease affecting an estimated 190 million women and uterus bearing people worldwide. Despite its prevalence, it remains profoundly under researched and has no cure. The condition exposes a longer history in which medicine has treated the biologically male body as its universal reference, producing forms of knowledge that have systematically delayed, minimized, or dismissed pain associated with female reproductive bodies.

In this new installation, Laia Abril examines chronic pain as both a physiological condition and a political one. Bringing together seven people living with disabling endometriosis, the work asks how a condition defined by its resistance to visibility might be represented without reducing it to spectacle or illustration. Fragmented and photographed in moments of temporary relief, the bodies resist the coherent, legible subject expected by clinical imaging. Instead, they register endurance, dissociation, and the physical adaptations through which pain becomes inhabitable. Varnished with tears, the photographs invoke the historical violence embedded in obstetric practices while pointing to the ongoing institutional neglect surrounding the disease.

A direct continuation of On Mass Hysteria, the third chapter of A History of Misogyny, the installation extends Abril’s long term investigation into the relationship between gender, institutional power, and the production of knowledge. Rather than approaching endometriosis solely as a medical condition, the work examines how systems of diagnosis determine whose pain becomes credible, whose testimony acquires authority, and which bodies remain illegible. In doing so, it positions medicine not only as a site of care but also as a cultural apparatus that shapes the visibility, legitimacy, and governance of pain.