Womb, Exit
2024
Womb, Exit is an intimate installation that reimagines underground abortion practices developed in restrictive environments. Inspired by historical massage and magical techniques used to induce abortion, it transforms vibration, compression, and sound into a sensory encounter with the tension between care and control, access and denial.
While abortion is technically permitted under narrow conditions in Indonesia, in practice it remains inaccessible for most women. Bureaucratic delays, stigma from healthcare providers, and the threat of criminalisation force many to seek unsafe, underground methods. Hospitals and clinics often deny care on moral grounds, reducing reproductive rights to a privilege rather than a guarantee. These systemic barriers push reproductive autonomy into the shadows, where survival depends on secrecy, improvisation, and risk.
Womb, Exit channels this hidden history. By drawing on massage and magic-based techniques once used to induce abortion, the work references practices that were both illicit and essential, methods that persisted in plain sight yet were rendered invisible by law and morality. In translating these gestures into vibration, compression, and sound, the installation makes palpable the pressures that restrict women’s choices, while also evoking the ingenuity of underground care. At its core, the piece reflects the paradox of visibility: reproductive rights in Indonesia are not simply erased, but strategically obscured, acknowledged only as criminal, never as healthcare.