Sarabande’s Tangle Teaser Exhibit celebrates the powerful history of hair
Sarabande is a London-based foundation housing fifteen creative studios of multiple art disciplines including fashion designers, jewellers, painters, dancers, photographers, filmmakers and more. It is committed to driving creative industries forward through collaborative events and exhibitions. Its latest exhibition, Tangle Teaser, explored how artists use hair to examine themes of lineage, conditions, tradition, gender, sexuality, politics and liberation.
The way hair is styled has been a source of female empowerment for centuries. Hair is used as a marker across all countries and cultures to reveal relationships and allegiances to some of the world’s greatest issues. Using the various mediums of the artists at Sarabande, the foundation demonstrated how hair is a foil to the world’s history and current events.
As part of the Women Artist’ Art Week World initiative, the Tangle Teaser exhibition commemorated the impactful work and artistic accomplishments of eight female-identifying artists who, through a variety of mediums, produced work reflective of the relationship hair holds in the modern world.
Camilla Hanney’s art installation, Domestic Pleasure.
While hair attached to the head is an easily recognizable symbol of beauty, the artists at Sarabande juxtaposed that preconception by presenting the power of hair in eclectic ways. Artist Camilla Hanney took one of those noticeable stabs at subverting those expectations with her work Domestic Pleasure, a wooden broom woven with luscious red hair in the place of course bristles, which streams down onto the floor in a long braid.
Anouska Samm’s ceramic art, DARK.
Ceramic artist Anouska Samms weaved together her matrilineal history into pottery to represent the familial bonds and DNA passed down through each generation of women. Samms work is conducted with red hair specifically to commemorate the generations old tradition among the women in her family to dye their hair this vibrant colour.
Shannon Bono’s painting, Africa’s Pride.
Painter and hairstylist Shannon Bono displayed her art and hosted a pop-up salon at Tangle Teaser. Bono’s salon acted as a representative network of the connection and community shared between Black women. Both in the styles created on-site and those embedded in her paintings, Bono’s work fuses contemporary hair trends with the 1920s Congolese hairstyle motifs.
Shirin Fathi’s photography, First stage of rhinoplasty.
Tangle Teaser’s curator, artist Shirin Fathi, was inspired by her Iranian heritage and drive to empower women through art for this one-of-a-kind exhibition. “Since the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran, the meaning of hair has transformed from being a cause for fear into a powerful political tool for resistance,” said Fathi in a press release about the exhibition.
Artist’s rendition of Mahsa Amini, the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
Want more creative exhibits? Read up on the Bata Shoe Musuem’s In Bloom exhibit.
Carolina Pucciarelli is a Glossi Mag contributor.
In her final year of journalism school at Toronto Metropolitan University, Carolina loves Octavia Butler novels, Guillermo del Toro movies and a good skincare regimen.
