Carmen Winant is exhibiting her large-scale installation The Last Safe Abortion (2023) in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States. Curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, the exhibition is open from March 20 through August 11, 2024.
The 2,500 prints Carmen Winant has assembled here form a collective portrait of the ordinary, daily tasks required to provide abortion health care—a project that became much more urgent with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Winant worked across the Midwest and the South with the archives of special collections, university hospitals, but predominantly with clinics to collect photographs of staff, physicians, and volunteers taken over a fifty-year period. She arranged the photographs so that they have a visual rhythm, which she refers to as “a tapestry with warp and weft,” that draws the eyes to groupings that present brief vignettes. No real patients appear here— in some cases, images show clinic staff modeling as patients. Every sitter pictured from recent years has given their permission to appear in this installation at the Biennial, and all archives were approved for use in the artist’s project. This is important to Winant; she thinks of the process of building trust and community as an essential part of the work itself.
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