Where Hair Remembers

Artist Statement

After the age of nine, I was forced to cover my hair. What began as a rule slowly became a lingering question-why? one that stayed with me for years. Hair, once a site of freedom and pleasure, transformed into something regulated, hidden, and controlled.

Over time, I came to understand my hair as an extension of my identity, intimate, political, and alive. In this work, I collect and archive the hair of people I know, treating each strand as a living trace of the self. These fragments function as symbols of life, memory, and presence, holding stories that resist erasure.

Through this archive, I reflect on the ways bodies are shaped by power, while honoring hair as a quiet yet radical form of personal and collective identity.