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 19000 arrests. Governments around the world issued statements condemning this horrific repression, except India, that chose to remain silent.

CAMPAIGN 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.

OOH OBJECTIVE

Our campaign was the first ad campaign to be invited to the India Art Fair, Asia's largest art fair. To create interest we took our work outdoor inviting viewers to stop, think, and experience the work for themselves.

POETRY IN FORM

The objective was to pictorially capture the ‘Every Woman’ – delayered of her ethnicity, nationality, and religion, so that the Indian woman can see herself and what she has gone through, in our subject.

To truly capture this subjugation viscerally, and draw attention to the repression in Iran, a woman covered in a burqa made of her own hair would be the metaphor for the shackles that bind every woman and the existential havoc such repression wreaks on her spirit. Arresting and thought provoking, we wanted the subject to be visible, so that she isn’t just looking at you but straight through you – her plight, your plight. Her cause, your cause. Visually, we carried the idea forward to show the ways in which hair has been weaponized by patriarchy to subjugate a woman.

The politics of hair is deeply entrenched in Indian culture. Religious and patriarchal practices have effectively made a woman's hair her shackles - one dictated and controlled by society around her. This is why the atrocities in Iran struck a very resonant chord among Indian women.

A GEOPOLITICAL DILEMMA

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 brutal regime.