The Beauty Shop
“Black folks spend more on hair and skin care products than they do on food.”
The body is a contested space in consumer culture, where desires to transform hair, face, skin complexion and body parts speak to complex dynamics around Western ideals of beauty. For people of African descent, in a globalised world, hair texture, skin complexion, full nose, lips and body shape, flesh out the cultural politics of everyday life. The cosmetics industry in general and the High Street beauty shop in particular, cater for gendered desires to transform hair, lighten skin, and groom the body through treatments, styling techniques and artifice.
As a multi-media installation-based exhibition curated by McMillan, The Beauty Shop brought the performativity, practices and ideologies about maintaining, transforming and beautifying the Black body in the context of postcolonial modernity to the gallery space of 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, Brixton, London in 2008.
Exhibition guide for The Beauty Shop:
The Beauty Shop consisted of a typical High Street beauty shop as installation, which was sponsored by Paks Hair Cosmetics and Sleek Makeup; a multi-media room that included listening posts, short films, a display of archive images from the Harry Jacobs collection supplied by Lambeth Archives, and an interactive vox pox for visitor comments. The public toilet was transformed in a domestic style with sayings/proverbs about the body printed on the wall tiles.
It was complimented by a series of activities as part of a public programme: ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ A retail therapy workshop; ‘The more it hurts, the better it looks’ A Writer’s Saloon; and ‘On Beauty’ A panel discussion. Publicity artwork was created by Paul Vaughan, and the exhibition was visually documented by Dave Lewis and McMillan.
Photo stills of The Beauty Shop installation:
Photo stills of the multi-media room, where visitors could listen to a series of sound bites about the Black experience of hair, skin and body image while looking at themselves in a mirror; view a series of short films about Black hair, and contribute their own lived experience of hair and the body via a Vox Pox.
Harry Jacobs’ archives images from Lambeth Archives:
Photo stills of the stylised public toilets:
Poet, Khadijah Ibrahiim performing in ‘The more it hurts, the better it looks’ A Writer’s Saloon, 2008.