Tau Battice's Her Hair Reveals, RIO Gallery 3 Photo Exhibition
Her Hair Reveals
Born in Basseterre, St. Kitts-Nevis and based in New York City, Tau Battice is a lifelong lover of
the photograph and its power to preserve the moment, proclaim nuance, and propel humanity to positive action. He teaches at Guttman, City University of New York and lives in Harlem.
Specializing in portraiture, with a primary interest in creating visual ethnographies of the
underrepresented African diaspora, Tau engages long-term personal projects and is concurrently working on his first monograph “Harlem in the Time of Corona.”
“Seu Cabelo Revela” or “Her Hair Reveals” is an ethno-visual project examining, through intimate portraiture and interview, the role of hair in the black Brazilian woman’s estimation and assertion of herself. It aspires to understand and highlight the complex relationship the black woman has developed with her hair.
Necessarily, the project interrogates notions of beauty, femininity, desirability, opportunity, and social mobility in a land that touts its “racial democracy.”
The work collects the lived, but often, muted experiences of a cross-section of Brazilian women of self-identified West African descent, and thus examines the ongoing push for a fully-respected womanhood and the re-signifying of Black womanhood in an arguably Euro-norming country.
The Afro Brazilian woman has “reinvest[ed] [her] hair with positive significance,” and this work spotlights this claiming/reclaiming of her inherent humanity and beauty through her literal “crown.”
Read MoreBorn in Basseterre, St. Kitts-Nevis and based in New York City, Tau Battice is a lifelong lover of
the photograph and its power to preserve the moment, proclaim nuance, and propel humanity to positive action. He teaches at Guttman, City University of New York and lives in Harlem.
Specializing in portraiture, with a primary interest in creating visual ethnographies of the
underrepresented African diaspora, Tau engages long-term personal projects and is concurrently working on his first monograph “Harlem in the Time of Corona.”
“Seu Cabelo Revela” or “Her Hair Reveals” is an ethno-visual project examining, through intimate portraiture and interview, the role of hair in the black Brazilian woman’s estimation and assertion of herself. It aspires to understand and highlight the complex relationship the black woman has developed with her hair.
Necessarily, the project interrogates notions of beauty, femininity, desirability, opportunity, and social mobility in a land that touts its “racial democracy.”
The work collects the lived, but often, muted experiences of a cross-section of Brazilian women of self-identified West African descent, and thus examines the ongoing push for a fully-respected womanhood and the re-signifying of Black womanhood in an arguably Euro-norming country.
The Afro Brazilian woman has “reinvest[ed] [her] hair with positive significance,” and this work spotlights this claiming/reclaiming of her inherent humanity and beauty through her literal “crown.”
