Hayaty Diaries & Hunna Art are Making Hair Political in Paris

When founder of Hayaty Diaries Christina Shoucair's sister chopped her long, flowing hair into a chic bob, her personality transformed with it. She had always been proud of it, and chopping it off without warning seemed to reorganise something in how she identified herself. That shift set Shoucair thinking about what hair actually carries beyond appearance: a self-definition that others can read from across a room.

The resulting exhibition, 'What Touches the Scalp is Close to the Bone', opens June 3rd in Paris's and runs through June 10th. Presented by Hunna Art and curated by Hayaty Diaries, the show brings together artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia around a single starting point: what hair carries beyond the physical.

"Hair is identity, hair is cultural transmission, hair is connection, hair is adornment," Shoucair says. The artists were each given that framework and left to find their own way into it.

In the Arab world, hair is always being read. Whether it is covered or uncovered, grown long or cut short, it carries religious significance, communicates social compliance, and is subject to family expectation in a way that few other physical details are.

"There are so many different ways to look at it," Shoucair says. "Concealing hair, revealing hair, what spaces do you show hair in?" Each of those questions points to the same underlying one: to whose standards is the hair being dressed for?

For Shoucair, who is Lebanese, those standards began at home and never fully left. "Hair is a huge part of our expression of femininity," she says, "and there's this idea that you have to look as feminine, put together, elegant, and wrapped up as possible." The consequences of departing from that read as self-damage rather than a personal choice. "If I shaved my head, I think my grandmother would have a nervous breakdown. She would see it as ruining yourself."

Part of what makes hair such a generative subject is how visibly it marks time. "Your hair grows, your hair is chopped, it regrows, then you get old, then it falls out — it reflects time," Shoucair says. The artists in the exhibition each find a different way into that dimension, from the folkloric to the historical.

Among the Egyptian artists in the show is Amina Yahia, whose graphite and charcoal drawing 'Do You Know What Hair Is Used For?' (2026) is rooted in an Egyptian folk understanding of hair as something that remains tied to its owner after leaving the body: a strand held by someone else gives them a kind of proximity to the person it came from, for protection or for harm. In the drawing, a young girl's hair covers her face entirely and stretches past her feet, moving with a direction that appears to belong to something other than the girl herself.

Egyptian artist Samo Shalaby takes the theme of time and memory into the Art Nouveau period of the 1890s. His painting 'The First Frost' centres on a chatelaine, the ornamental chain worn at the waist that women of the era used to carry the tools of daily life: a watch set to 6:05 in the morning, lipstick, scissors, a hair locket, spectacles, a dance card, a perfume bottle, and antique keys, among others. In Shalaby's work, these objects have lost their function and become repositories of memory instead, each one mapping a stage of a life being set aside. Painted on an aluminium panel with marble powder, diamond dust, and frost needles, the surface shifts with the viewer's position while the chatelaine remains still.The broader group covers a considerable range of positions. Maria, an Iranian artist, addresses hair as a site of identity politics and gender conflict, working in a textured, declarative style where the political is made legible through the personal. Abeer Sultan, a Saudi artist, contributes 'The Repatriation of a Lost Tooth II', an installation that draws a connection between hair and teeth as parallel biological calendars: both emerge in childhood, mark decades of use on the body, and eventually fall out, recording time in the same register.

The show is the second collaboration between Hunna and Hayaty, following 'I Dreamt We Dreamt of Eden', which they co-presented in Kuwait in February. Shoucair, the London-based founder and director of Hayaty Diaries, and Océane Sailly, founder of Hunna Art, first connected properly in Paris just over a year ago, both focused on women artists and regional voices and already watching each other's programmes closely enough that working together felt like the natural next step.

"I can give access to more of a Western perspective," Shoucair says. "She can give access to more of a regional perspective, and together we can create a really beautiful audience for the work." Paris, where their relationship first took shape, made it the fitting location for this second project.

Hayaty Diaries was founded in London in 2022 as a nomadic curatorial platform, starting exclusively with women artists from the MENA region before opening to artists of other identities, provided the work earns its place. Shoucair is direct about the standard: "Unless you're exceptional, babe, you're probably not getting into the mix."

The aim that sits behind that is for art to be assessed without the qualifier of where it comes from. "I want art to be looked at as art, and artists to be looked at as artists, versus hyper-focusing on identity," she says. Hunna Art, founded by Sailly in Kuwait in 2021, is a gallery focused on women artists from and connected to the Arabian Peninsula.

'What Touches the Scalp is Close to the Bone' opens June 3rd at 8 rue Chapon in Paris, with a public reception from 5pm to 9pm. The exhibition runs through June 10th.