HAIRITAGE
A MULTI-LENS EXHIBITION ON HAIR & IDENTITY
CATEGORY
Multi-Lens Exhibition
LOCATION
200CENT Gallery, Barcelona
YEAR
2025
ROLE
Creative Director · Curator · Experience Designer · Research Lead · Graphic Designer · Editor
About the project
Hairitage explored hair as far more than a physical characteristic. Across cultures and generations, hair carries stories of identity, memory, heritage, politics, spirituality, resistance, and belonging.
Bringing together seven international artists, four community oral histories, participatory installations, public programmes, and editorial publishing, the exhibition invited visitors to investigate how hair carries identity, memory, heritage, culture, and belonging across generations.
WHAT STORIES DOES OUR HAIR CARRY?
Hair is often treated as appearance.
Yet throughout history it has functioned as identity, resistance, ritual, memory, ancestry, discrimination, celebration, and self-expression.
Hairitage emerged from a simple curiosity:
What happens when we stop looking at hair as aesthetics and begin understanding it as culture?
Rather than presenting definitive answers, the exhibition created space for multiple perspectives to coexist through artworks, research, dialogue, and participation.
VISITORS BECAME CONTRIBUTORS TO AN EVOLVING CONVERSATION AROUND HAIR & IDENTITY.
Hairitage was conceived as a Multi-Lens Exhibition™, combining artistic, scientific, cultural, philosophical, and experiential approaches to explore the cultural significance of hair across different communities.
Visitors moved through artworks examining themes such as identity, migration, race, beauty standards, memory, and belonging while also engaging with experiences that invited them to contribute their own hair.
.jpg)
INSTEAD OF A LINEAR NARRATIVE, THE EXHIBITION JUXTAPOSED DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES TO GIVE VISITORS A RICHER, MORE COMPLEX UNDERSTANDING OF THE THEME.
Contemporary artworks were presented alongside curatorial research, interviews, workshops, conversations with artists and practitioners, a research publication, and participatory installations. Each layer expanded the exhibition from a different perspective, allowing visitors to move between observation, dialogue, reflection, making, and contribution.
Participation existed throughout the exhibition—not as the destination, but as one of several ways of engaging with the topic.
Participatory Installation
Fragments of Us
A participatory installation inviting visitors to donate a small strand of their own hair.
Participants selected the hair category that best represented them and contributed it to a growing collective archive.
What began as individual gestures gradually became a visual portrait of everyone who had passed through the exhibition.
Experience Program
Cyanotype Workshop
Led by exhibiting artist Sara Medina, participants learned the cyanotype process used in her exhibited work Despedida, creating their own prints while gaining insight into her artistic practice.
Experience Program
Hair Conversations
A moderated public conversation bringing together MK, a loctician specialising in Afro hair and locks, and exhibiting artist Elio Sol, whose painting Bom Cabelo challenged beauty standards surrounding Afro-textured hair.
Together they explored hair through artistic practice, professional expertise, cultural heritage, identity, and lived experience, while opening the discussion to audience participation and questions.
Publication
Hairitage Zine
A transmedia research publication extending the exhibition beyond the gallery.
The publication investigated the exhibition's central question through a series of interviews with members of Barcelona's international community—including contributors from China, Venezuela, Kenya, and Chile—becoming an archive of the city's international creative community.
BEHIND THE EXPERIENCE
Hairitage demonstrates my Multi-Lens Exhibitions™ methodology by investigating one central question through multiple ways of knowing rather than relying on artworks alone.
