Bald Performance Art Shave My Head Again

i-D Hair Calendar week is an exploration of how our hairstyles commencement conversations most identity, civilisation and the times we live in.

"It's deeply bruising to fight against your identity," 30-year-old creative person Diana Chire wrote in the statement accompanying her work Hair Manifesto, shown as part of a group exhibition earlier this year. It was a continuation of a performance that began when, in 2016, Diana invited a group of friends to her studio to sentry her shave her head, getting rid of the weaves she had been having washed for decades. The experience was majorly freeing for the artist, whose piece of work is centered on her own torso every bit a medium. "When I looked in the mirror I was like, Wow this is who I am, this is me, I simply felt similar I was walking differently and I was making decisions and there was this conviction that I hadn't had before." She kept the hair, and for a while was unsure what to practice with it, until she institute the right resting place, embroidering the weave onto pillowcases, spelling out sentences from her studio diary of the xxx days leading upwardly to shaving her caput, in which she reflected on how her hair had come to inform, and also keep her detached from, her sense of cocky.

Diana Chire at the Impact Sensitive exhibition, courtesy of the artist.

For a long time it had been such a loaded office of Diana'southward identity. She remembers a child existence made to experience her natural hair wasn't adept hair. "People would be like, 'it'southward too big, information technology gets in the way, I tin't meet anything.' And so you're trying to flatten information technology, you become to the dorsum of the class. You begin to feel similar you accept to subscribe to what other people want you to, which is why I think I started relaxing my hair. I didn't want other people to touch my hair, it made me feel like a freak."

Born in Arab republic of egypt to parents from Ethiopia, Diana was raised in London from the age of 5. While at academy she began experimenting with functioning art, and though it increasingly came to circumduct around her own identity, she held back from piece of work that touched on race. "I remember I was always a fleck scared to do annihilation that was too racial, because I'd always be the only person of color in the course and sometimes if you make work about things like that, people don't get it." Afterwards leaving university and becoming more sure of herself and her fine art, Diana's medium became her own torso, and then her experience every bit a adult female of color was fundamental to her explorations.

After decades of getting pilus weaves, Diana faced upwards to the anxiety information technology induced, feeling similar information technology always needed to be it 'washed', to be fixed, that her pilus in its natural country couldn't be cute. The more her work became anchored in her concrete state, the more than she began to experience she needed to strip abroad the pilus that wasn't hers. "I was just sick and tired of having fake pilus, and doing all this work about being completely connected with myself and true to myself and just felt kind of fraudulent."

Diana Chire past Claudia Legge

Currently working towards a functioning piece in September, the artist is preparing to sideslip into different skin, literally. She's making fleshy latex moulds of her feet, confront and hands, for a work that will dig into the use of skin lightening products among women of color. "Whenever I would get to purchase hair extensions they would always accept skin lightening products for sale. In Ethiopia I know that they have adverts featuring white women — in a predominantly black land."

Shaving her caput was liberating, simply information technology came with limitations as her hair, or lack of, remained a focus. "I loved non having any pilus, but the thing about having a shaved head was that all anybody did was talk about my shaved head." She's now growing her pilus out, liking the texture of her own pilus and looking frontwards to having an afro, no longer worrying about it beingness big and untamed. While her hair is in this in-between stage, Diana's been playing around with wearing wigs. That has led to people around her to say she's going against everything her shaved head stood for. "That performance is still at that place and is still continued to my practice and who I am, but me just temporarily wearing a wig doesn't mean I'm going dorsum on everything," she says. A wig is another experiment? "It'south similar performing, I'm wearing a wig and I'grand this person. It'southward but some other persona." When she finally grows in her fro, information technology's sure to elicit a different kind of˚attending. Diana's hair equally performance plays out the hypocrisy and politics so entwined with appearance for women of color. Just taking control of her own hair has given the artist a way to connect with a part of her identity she'd felt at odds with for and so many years. "When my hair started growing out again it was the first fourth dimension I'd felt the actual texture of my hair, because I'd been relaxing it from such a long age. I was like, This is what my hair feels similar! Ok, this is cool."

Credits

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Text Clementine de Pressigny
Images courtesy Diana Chire

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Source: https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/papgvv/this-artist-shaved-her-head-to-get-back-to-her-roots

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