STIR's Hair and Her: an art-fair protest women joined by cutting their hair

STIR, a design and art platform, premiered 'Hair and Her' at India Art Fair 2023 in Delhi, conceived by FCB India's chief creative chairwoman Swati Bhattacharya with photographer Rohit Chawla. The work answered a question about the policing of women's hair across cultures — from mythology to school rules to the Iranian woman whose death in 2022 followed an escape of a tendril of hair from her hijab.

At the Art Alive Gallery booth, a collage of photographs and a short film showed a woman gagged and bound by thick ropes of her own hair, who snips herself free — an eye, then her wrists, then bare feet. Visitors could take away a newspaper made entirely of headlines about women's hair from around the world.

The centerpiece was a transparent donation box inviting visitors to snip and leave a tuft of their own hair. By the end of the day it held black, brown and blonde tufts side by side — strangers of every background casting their difference aside in a shared, physical act of protest. 'When one is moved to leave a piece of themselves behind, it's more precious than an Instagram like,' Bhattacharya said.

The work won Gold in Industry Craft at Cannes Lions 2023 — FCB India's first gold of that festival — and went on to take the Design Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2024 under the title 'Untangling the Politics of Hair'.

A box of visitors' hair turned viewers into protesters

Hair is one of the most intimate things a person can give up; asking for a snip of it made participation costly and therefore sincere, unlike a signature or a like.

The transparent box made solidarity accumulate visibly in public, so each visitor's act encouraged the next.

The newspaper of real headlines turned a diffuse, centuries-old history into something legible in one page.

For a design magazine, the protest was the content: the installation demonstrated STIR's editorial argument instead of merely stating it.

Asking for something intimate and irreversible converts an audience into participants. A campaign that costs the visitor a piece of themselves generates belief no polished message can.

Hair and Her became one of India's most awarded craft works: Gold in Industry Craft at Cannes Lions 2023, then the Design Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2024. Chawla's images and the cut-hair box kept the conversation about the policing of women's appearance alive well beyond the fair.