“a young girl is growing up” 2003, photograph, 175x140 cm

This young girl growing up has to act out this ritual everyday for her hair to be straight and tidy. Her mother irons her glossy black hair. She kneels down in the centre of a baroque space, her face expressionless with the internalized images within her. The more she remembers her wavy hair, the less she feels she exists. Change has for has become a kind of magic. She reads the striking image of her “straight hair” as a philosophical text. Which myth is it that she follows through the authority the iron has on her hair!...
From the theatrical feast of change to the representative poetry of the straight hair, from the paranoia of affectation to the practical critique of a formed rather than natural beauty, hereafter the figure has completed the theoretical framework of its own spectacle.