The Museo Nacional del Romanticismo presents Endometriosis. El dolor silenciado 1860–2026, a new photographic exhibition by Laia Abril. Winner of the 2023 National Photography Award and the youngest artist ever to receive this distinction, Abril develops a new project devoted to endometriosis and its long history of silence. The exhibition is presented as part of PHotoESPAÑA 2026.
The installation brings together the bodies of seven people suffering from debilitating pain caused by endometriosis, depicted in fragmented states of rest, evoking the dissociation required for their survival.
These images—infused with Abril’s tears—evoke the ongoing violence of obstetric practices and the persistent invisibilisation of a condition affecting millions of women worldwide.
Following the conceptual lineage of "On Mass Hysteria", one of Abril’s most acclaimed projects, the exhibition establishes a historical continuity between the pathologisation of female bodies and the systematic delegitimisation of pain. The work denounces the ways in which, within sexual and reproductive healthcare, medicine has often functioned more as a mechanism of control than as a means of care.
