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The Last Safe Abortion

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Spiral bound flexicover
30.5 x 22 cm
172 pages
Artist: Carmen Winant
Author: Carmen Winant
Published by MACK - SPBH
ISBN 978-1-739606-75-6

Carmen Winant

50,00 €

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Focusing on the near-fifty-year period in which abortion was legal in the United States (1973–2022), The Last Safe Abortion recognises the care, advocacy, and community-building of abortion workers. Artist Carmen Winant draws from over a dozen personal, organisational, and institutional archives from across the Midwest, in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Ohio. The photographs themselves are surprisingly regular: women answer the phone, sterilize medical equipment, throw staff birthday parties, offer workshops, and schedule appointments. In centring the tender, quotidian, and routine acts that inform this healthcare work, Winant works to counter the ways anti-choice activists have weaponised photography by proposing a visuality that attends to abortion care.

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Carmen Winant is a writer and visual artist who explores representations of women through collage, mixed media and installation. She is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at The Ohio State University and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography.

Winant utilizes installation and collage strategies to examine feminist modes of survival and revolt. Her recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Sculpture Center, The Columbus Museum of Art, and The Wexner Center of the Arts. Winant’s artist books — My Life as a Man and My Birth — were published by Horses Think Press, SPBH Editions, and ITI press; her forthcoming artist book will be published by Printed Matter Inc. Winant’s work has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BOMB, The Guardian, and Art in America.

In 2019, Winant published with Printed Matter the book Notes on Fundamental Joy, seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us. She lives in Columbus, OH, with her partner Luke Stettner and her two and four-year-old sons, Rafa and Carlo.

'In this project, what seems most serviceable is the proliferation of images – thousands, across decades, attesting to the healthcare work that has been performed throughout history, and will continue, in networks of organised, feminist care.’ ArtReview

'The visual language of anti-abortion lobbying … is as sensational as it is inaccurate. With The Last Safe Abortion, Winant wanted to construct an alternate canon of abortion photography.’ Document Journal

'In an age when images are so easily found online and digitally combined, Winant’s decision to amass a tangible archive and manipulate her source material by hand reflects a conspicuous conviction in the advantages of tactile experience.’ Artforum

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