Madyha Leghari
MFA ’18 Photography
A fictional city grapples with an inexplicable, complete loss of hair. Posited both as an extension and the boundary of a body, hair occupies a liminal position between the animate and inanimate “dead” matter. Since the influence of evolutionary thought in the nineteenth century, comparative hairlessness in humans has been the subject of extensive cultural debate and resultant shift in its value. “Excessive” human hair is variously associated with sexual inversion, the primitive, the criminal, the pathological, the diseased, the beast or even the lunatic. The film satirizes these accounts by removing the supposed evolutionary obstacle posed by hair. However, the resultant world is that of tactile longing, sensory deprivation, and eco-anxiety.
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Madyha Leghari is an artist, writer and educator, based in Lahore. She pursued a BFA from NCA, Lahore and an MFA from MassArt on a Fulbright Scholarship. Madyha has been the recipient of the Vasl Writing Mentorship; Mansion residency; Delta Research Placement; Siena Art Institute residency and the Murree Museum residency. She has shown her works internationally at platforms such as University of Colorado Boulder, Bennington College, Sea Foundation, The Institute for Experimental Arts, Antimatter and others.
