Rachael Jablo is a chronically ill, queer, Jewish, Berlin-based American artist and educator who works with storytelling, photography, installation, and collage to discuss issues around illness, the body, and gender. Her work has been seen recently in a solo exhibition at USC’s Hoyt Gallery, at the Torrance Museum, and at the Museum für Fotographie in Braunschweig and has been featured in Ever-Emerging Magazine, on WNYC’s The Takeaway, and Slate. She published her photographic monograph about chronic migraine, My days of losing words, with Kehrer Verlag in 2013. Her recent work, The Hysteria Project, received a Neustart Kultur Grant for Innovative Arts from the German Government in 2021–2022. She is part of the EU-wide #ENDOs art and narrative medicine project running through 2025.
On 23 May 2024 at 18:00, Rachael Jablo gave a lecture at Forum Stadtpark and also opened the exhibition of selected pieces from her work The Hysteria Project.
"The Hysteria Project is a single story project dealing with menstruation, reproductive and abdominal disorders, illustrated by individual portraits of the participants' reproductive organs based on their stories. These life-size, intimate works are created using a traditional darkroom process in which I use lace instead of negatives to make color prints, which I cut out and glue onto a gold leaf background. The works on display are mounted in gold-plated laser-cut Plexiglas frames.
Listening to people tell the story of their bodies, sometimes for the first time, is as important as the actual artworks. This is listening as activism. Many storytellers have suffered in silence for years. Some had never spoken to anyone because menstruation and illness are taboo in many cultures. And what virtually all of us share is that our experiences are dismissed by the medical community. The online archive of stories and artwork is searchable by symptom, diagnosis and keyword. People with gynecological disorders can read stories and see that they are not alone in their experiences. In addition, doctors and future healthcare professionals can learn from our experience and become better, more compassionate caregivers."
- Taken from the Hysteria Project website, www.hysteriaproject.org
Cover photo credit: Rachael Jablo, Macarena (she/her, 42, Latina, in Chile), with deep infiltrating endometriosis, adenomyosis, and fibroids
