Barbara Kruger created a poster bearing the phrase “Your body is a battleground” for a massive abortion rights protest known as the 1989 Women’s March on Washington. Thirty-five years later, the struggle for body autonomy remains just as relevant.
On 1 May, Florida joined a dozen other states in instituting a near-total ban on abortion. And it is into this context that a 27ft-long box truck displaying art celebrating body autonomy arrived in Miami this week. The project kicked off in September in New York as the brainchild of curators Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol. Since then, the exhibition has made its way to locations in Iowa, Missouri, California, New Mexico and Texas. At every stop, part of the installation rotates to make room for local artists and collaborators who have given talks and hosted events with the truck as a focal point.
In Miami, the project, titled BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY), will set up in a different location each day. Earlier in the week it was at the New Art Dealers Alliance (Nada) fair. On Friday it will be parked at Miami Ironside in partnership with Art Mamas, a group of artist mothers. And on Sunday the truck will be parked outside the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
“It’s an end-of-the-fairs celebration and detox,” Wahi says. Several local artists’ works will be on view there, including Cornelius Tulloch, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Rachel Lee Hovnanian and Terrell Villiers. The event is co-hosted by Commissioner, a Miami-based group for patrons supporting living artists.
The organisers plan to continue their national tour in 2025, and the project will also exist in the form of a website archiving documentation of the panel discussions and artist talks, and compiling art related to body autonomy, reproductive rights, queer liberation and trans joy.
Many of the participating artists have works on view at this week’s fairs. At Art Basel Miami Beach, Sprüth Magers is showing pieces by Kruger, including the video Pledge,Will,Vow (1988/2020). Despite the familiarity of her aesthetic, something is still unsettling about her work, and the organisers of BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY) say the truck has attracted stares and even some middle fingers from passersby during its cross-country drive. But, they add, the prevailing tone of the response has been one of respect and inspiration.
Kruger herself chose the “Battleground” work for the project. “Bringing it back to life in 2024 in such a large-scale way,” Jampol says, is “about the intergenerational conversation between the younger folks who are viewing this for the first time, and it creates a platform to have an intersectional dialogue about body freedom”.