Barbara Kruger Artwork Becomes Symbol in Movement Protesting Poland's New Abortion Laws

January 6, 2021

UCLA Department of Art Professor and American conceptual/pop artist Barbara Kruger is best known for laying aggressively directive slogans over black-and-white photographs that she finds in magazines and other ephemera or over fields of red. Her work largely addresses cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality.

Barbara Kruger, Your Body is a Battleground (1989/1991) as seen on the streets of Szczecin, Poland. Photo by Andrzej Golc, courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, and the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Szczecin. From the collection of the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw.

"Inspired by protests against restrictive new Polish abortion laws, Barbara Kruger has revisited her 30-year-old text-based artwork, Your Body Is a Battleground, allowing versions of it to be pasted on the streets of the Polish city of Szczecin. The new edition is being created in partnership with the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art.

Originally designed for the occasion of the 1989 Women’s March in Washington, DC, which opposed efforts to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade US Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, the poster features a photograph of a woman’s face, half printed in negative. The work’s title is printed atop the image in Kruger’s signature red-and-white oblique Futura bold type.

“It is both tragic and predictable that the brutal conditions that led to my producing this image so many decades ago are still at work controlling women’s bodies and their access to reproductive care,” Kruger told Artnet News in an email. “The structures of power and containment are relentless in their choreographies of marginalization and exclusion.”

In October, the Polish constitutional court banned abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities. In a country that already had some of Europe’s strictest abortion laws, that will put an end to most of the 1,000 legal abortions that take place each year, allowing the procedure only in cases of rape, incest, and risk to the mother’s life."— Sarah Cascone, Dec. 16, 2020

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Artnet News website.
Read more about Barbara Kruger.

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