HAIR AND HATRED

On the 22nd of September 2022, Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by Iran’s morality police because a loose tendril of hair escaped her hijab. As protestors took to the streets across Iran, security forces came down heavily on them - resulting in over 5000 deaths and over 19000 arrests. Governments around the world issued statement after statement condemning this horrific repression, except India, that chose to remain silent.

OUR OBJECTIVE

This campaign aims to raise a voice of support to the women of Iran by bringing their plight close to home and heart, awakening Indian women to the truth that Iran's issue is not Iran's alone, but every woman’s issue.

The Indian government has always supported Iran at the UN. This complicated the response to the brutality that Iranian women were facing in their homeland. As the women of Iran sent out a plea to the democracies of the world for support, they received an outpouring of the same from around the globe. Which made the deafening sound of India’s indifference stand out even more. Politicians tight lipped and the press, gagged - India chose to remain silent as brutality and injustice rained down on the thousands of women at the mercy of their cruel regime.

THE ART OF ANTITHESIS

The objective was to show a true, natural, and visually arresting interpretation of the politics of hair. Simplicity and poetry of form over lights and mirrors. In a natural setting we captured the ‘Every Woman’ – delayered of her of ethnicity, nationality, and religion, so that the Indian woman can see herself and what she has gone through, in our subject.

At the heart is antithesis – where hair is typically photographed in its perfection – no strand out of place, we would make it a binder and reminder of centuries of repression. To represent hair as shackles to a woman’s sense of agency was the artistic provocation that we needed to arrest and inspire people to action.