Intimate Archives

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Free
Intimate Archives is a free display offering a window into African diasporic social experiments, rituals, and practices of hair care.

This exhibition is an assemblage of personal and found collections, Horniman Museum archives, and artistic collaborations. It articulates hair as a site of Black feminist care, community, and possibility.

Curated by Rambisayi Marufu, the exhibition includes work by Gelila Negussie, Olivia Ema, Ebun Oduwole and Foluke Taylor.

This work addresses the historical lack of care in institutional archives in which Black women’s interior lives, thoughts, imaginations, and experiences are silent. It makes visible the fact that even as we are scattered and fragmented through ongoing processes of dispossession, dispersals, and disorientations – across time and space – we re-member each other in acts of social care.

Special thanks to:

Nicole Mayangi, and all of the unnamed young women in the Horniman Museum archival images captured by Nancy Stanfield in Lagos, Nigeria, 1962.

Banner image by Ebun Oduwole