Artist Talk: Beauty, Value and Spirituality. The Humble Power of Combs and Hairpins

What stories can combs, hairpins and barbershop signs from the 19th and 20th centuries tell when they encounter contemporary art?

This Artist Talk brings together artists participating in Beauty, Value and Spirituality: The Humble Power of Combs and Hairpins (as part of the special exhibition Hidden Stories) to reflect on the making of the multimedia installation and the ideas that shaped it. The conversation will move between artistic practice, lived experience and the cultural meanings of hair.

Visitors are warmly invited to bring their own combs and take part in the discussion. The talk will be moderated by curator Henrie Dennis.

Participating artists:

Juliet Sofia Ishola is a Nigerian artist and performer working with hair, braiding and performance. She uses hair as a material for exploring memory and belonging. Her work has been presented with institutions including the Belvedere 21 and Weltmuseum Wien, and is shaped by an interest in culture, connection and lived experience.

Emran Sohel is a Bangladesh born Vienna based visual art practitioner whose work springs from his interpretations of local and global contexts surrounding modernity, postmodernity, and other contemporary conditions that defy categorisation. His focus is on how time, space, shapes, materials, forms, cultural and social behaviours influence one’s feelings. Emran also very focused on humanity and inhumanity. He operates within the space between natural and man-made environments, as well as personal and social timelines, while considering the hidden lives of plants and objects. He is one of the founding members of the Bangladesh-based collective artist group called DAAGI ART GARAGE and is involved in the collective initiative “Shoni Mongol Adda,” which focuses on sharing ideas and discussions with the local community. Additionally, he has collectively driven the art café ‘ReeLi (ঋঌ),’ which aims to engage with art actions as performative acts.

Pramila Lama is a Nepal-based visual artist currently studying in the post-conceptual department at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. As an Interdisciplinary art practitioner, her work focuses on themes such as gender inequality, memory, identity, human relationships, and narrative sharing. She aims to portray the prevalent beliefs and blind practices concerning women that persist as social norms in her home country. Additionally, issues of migration, geopolitics, and humanitarian identity play significant roles in her recent work, reflecting global concerns.

Fedor Shmelkin is documentary filmmaker and cinematographer working with research-based projects with a focus on sociopolitical topics.