Hair is one of the most loaded things a body can carry. It grows, falls out, gets cut off, hidden, braided, straightened, buried in soil, woven into cloth. It sits at the exact intersection of the intimate and the political — a private thing that societies have always had enormous opinions about. For some artists, hair is a passing reference, a texture, a detail. For others, it is the whole point: a material, a language, and an obsession that runs through everything they make.

Hatoum has returned to hair across decades, in forms that range from the microscopic to the architectural. What connects them is the insistence on hair as evidence of a body, of a life, of a presence that persists even after it has been shed.

For Recollection (1995), she spent six years collecting her own hair. The result was an installation in which strands hung from the ceiling, gathered in balls on the floor, and were beaded into necklaces — hair encountered throughout the gallery as a slow accumulation of the self, something between presence and remainder. The patience of it matters: six years of a body leaving traces of itself, gathered and kept.

Keffieh (1993–99) takes a different register entirely. The traditional Palestinian headscarf — but with women's hair woven in place of the cotton fringe. Hatoum wrote of it: "I imagine women pulling their hair out in anger and controlling that anger through the patient act of transcribing those strands of hair into an item of clothing which has become a potent symbol of the Palestinian resistance movement." The keffieh is historically a masculine object, associated with national struggle as defined by men. The hair woven into it — intimate, bodily, female — transforms it into something stranger and more charged: a garment made of grief and fury refashioned as care. What had been familiar becomes unfamiliar.

Across Hair Necklace, Hair Grid with Knots, and Hair There and Everywhere, hair functions as what it literally is: material evidence of a body. Once separated from it, it carries presence and absence simultaneously. It does not decay quickly. It remains — which, for an artist whose practice has been shaped by displacement and exile, is not a small thing.

For Afra Al Dhaheri, working with hair was a continuation. She grew up with hair down to her knees; the labour of it fell to her mother, who brushed and managed it all the time. It wasn't until university that Al Dhaheri realised no one had ever told her her natural hair was beautiful — she had always hidden it, straightened it, pulled it back.

Also, her mother ran a spa, and during those undergraduate years, Al Dhaheri opened a small salon there, cutting and styling hair long before she thought to make art from it.

The leap to the studio came through another artist. "I started collecting and creating with hair two or three years ago after seeing a necklace Mona Hatoum made from her hair," she said. "I was really taken by that." She began placing strands on paper, moving them with a brush, thinking about slow habitual rituals — her grandmother picking rice, practices meant to be time-consuming. A question emerged that would shape everything that followed: What does it mean that hair, extended by force, retracts in water back to the form it remembers?

That capacity — hair as something that knows its own shape — is exactly what her works enact. Ropes cascade from the ceiling and unravel at the floor the way a braid loosens. Cement discs coil into the cross-section of a plait.

In Tasreeha (2020), a six-metre-high installation, she braided only the outside of the structure — the façade — leaving the interior unworked. "It speaks to how we function as a society — always beautifying the outside and not really working on the inside," she said.

Her solo exhibition Split Ends (Green Art Gallery, Dubai, 2021) brought all of this together. The gallery was filled with thick braided cords hanging from ceiling to floor, dividing the space so that moving through it was a bodily experience. One at a Time stretched actual human hairs flat across cotton, taped down and straightened — care and constraint held in the same gesture.

The theme of hair first became urgent for El-Sagini when she started losing it. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she went through what she describes as the brutal amputations that come with the illness — not only physical, but psychological: the loss of a breast, the loss of hair. "These are difficult things to accept and talk about," she has said. The experience made her look very deeply inside her own body, at what was happening and how to adapt. Hair — its absence — became a way in.

What grew out of that period was not work about loss exactly, but about what loss forces you to understand: how the body keeps functioning, how strands hold together, what resilience actually looks like from the inside. The braid became her answer to that question formally. Three weak strands that become strong only when woven together. When one fails, the others hold.

Plot Twist, shown at Art Basel 2026 (Gypsum Gallery, Statements sector), is a bronze braid 3.5 meters high and spanning 6 meters, growing from a corner of the booth. El-Sagini describes it as coming from hair, the nervous system, and the interior of the body simultaneously — not as separate references but as one continuous image of how things hold. The bronze is muted grey, deliberately unprecious, pushed to its thinnest possible state: a material built for monuments made fragile. The strands separate and reconnect across the length of the work — apart, then back together. "Real resilience is very anti-heroic," she says. "It is subtle, it happens in the background." The braid is both the subject and the argument.