My Hair, A Border, NOW - 1980, part of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam collection since April 2021

In My Hair, A Border Ouédraogo investigates the relationship between Black hair and identity. She examines the culture surrounding Black hair by scanning, studying and depicting her own hair on a flag. The work reflects how categorisation and classifications pull the complexity of reality apart and reduce it to flat objects of scientific study. Ouédraogo appropriates this method and decolonizes this rigid approach: she brings the scanned image back into the public space, on a waving flag.

‘For this work, I examine the cultural surroundings of ‘black hair’ by scanning and depicting my own hair on a flag. As a flag, something that is so purely personal and often hidden becomes a graphic border on a big scale. A border, a trademark. For some people, it is recognizable as something intimate and of the self. For others, not.’

WHOmanity, 12 to 31 May 2020 (part of Amsterdam Ferry Festival)

Flags have always been a powerful means of communication. When a yellow and black flag is raised on a ship, a signal is given to the other ships that it is in quarantine for the coming 40 days. More often, flags represent (geo) political or social realities: they serve as an identifier that includes and excludes. The great associative value of this object makes the flag an interesting medium for artists to question these properties. What else can a flag be? In these times where ways of thinking and knowing, control and demarcation are being shaken, the artists will present 13 flags that play with language, images, symbols and beliefs.

Artists: Waèl el Allouche, Babi Badalov, Sara Culmann, Rini Hurkmans, Nikolay Karabinovych, Bernice Nauta, Ahmet Öğüt, Bodil Ouédraogo, Party of the Dead, Rory Pilgrim, Berkay Tuncay.

Curated by Robbie Schweiger

My Hair, a Border – digital print on PETFLAG – Edition of 5
Price on request, get in touch via bodil.ouedraogo@gmail.com