Mangelnde Evidenz

Emerging from personal experience, the project explores the visibility and silence surrounding abortion. Through portraits, medical spaces and archival imagery, it examines the social, institutional and moral structures shaping reproductive realities.

Mangelnde Evidenz - lack of evidence

Emerging from personal experience, Mangelnde Evidenz explores the visibility and silence surrounding abortion. My initial research was driven by an examination of my own feelings of shame and fear of stigma, prompting me to question why an experience shared by millions remains so difficult to represent and discuss publicly.

Despite being one of the most common reproductive experiences worldwide, abortion remains largely absent from visual culture, overshadowed by deeply rooted representations of motherhood, fertility and family. Mangelnde Evidenz examines the institutions, social imaginaries and moral frameworks that determine what becomes visible, what can be spoken about and what remains unseen. It understands abortion not as a private exception, but as a social reality shaped by broader cultural, political and institutional conditions.

Through portraits of people with lived experience and medical professionals, alongside images of medical spaces, infrastructures, religious symbols and objects, the project explores the different contexts in which abortion is understood, negotiated and experienced.

Rather than following a linear documentary approach, the work unfolds as a fragmented visual constellation. Analog archival material, in both black and white and colour, enters into dialogue with contemporary digital photographs, bringing different temporalities and forms of representation together. Rather than illustrating a medical procedure, Mangelnde Evidenz uses photography to explore the gaps, ambiguities and absences that shape how abortion is documented, understood and remembered.