Onidiri Hairitage Exhibition: Celebrating the Power, Politics, and Poetry of Black Hair

Yinka Olatunbosun

From August 12th to 30th, 2025, the Community House in Bromley, London becomes home to The Onidiri Hairitage Exhibition – a vibrant, culturally rooted group exhibition presented by the Onidiri Festival in partnership with the Tayese Academy of Arts and Culture. Curated by Kikelomo Solomon-Ayeni, the exhibition explores hair not merely as adornment, but as a living archive of history, identity, resilience, and beauty.

For London-based visual artist Olanrewaju Atanda, the show offers a deeply personal space to honour black womanhood, memory and cultural storytelling. His featured mixed-media work, Chaotic Beauty, stands as an intimate tribute to the aesthetic, emotional, and historical weight carried in black hair.

Chaotic Beauty captures a black woman portrayed against a deliberately chaotic abstract background – a visual metaphor for the turbulent histories, silenced voices, and unseen struggles hidden beneath the elegance of beauty traditions. Created using acrylic, charcoal, graphite, and Caran d’Ache watercolour crayons, the artwork reflects Atanda’s signature technique of layering emotion, symbolism and texture.
“A work like Chaotic Beauty reminds us,” the curatorial statement reads, “that hair has always been more than beauty – it is history, heritage, and identity woven together.”
The piece affirms that greatness often emerges from seemingly uncertain or obscure places, a message that resonates deeply with diasporic memory and the lived experiences of black communities worldwide.

Indeed, the exhibition expands the conversation on hair beyond aesthetics, grounding it in cultural memory and lived experiences. Hair becomes a map of lineage, an archive of social evolution, a symbol of community pride, and at times, a site of political struggle.
“Hair is a cultural identity. Hairstyles are beautifiers and indicators that tell stories and point back to our heritage,” Atanda remarks.
In a global moment where black hair continues to be a subject of debate, legislation, celebration, and reclamation, The Onidiri Hairitage Exhibition offers both an artistic response and an invitation to dialogue.

Alongside Atanda’s work, the group exhibition features artists whose practices trace the spiritual, ancestral, and sociocultural meanings of hair across generations. Through mixed media, textile, photography, and sculpture, the show becomes a visual anthology – each artwork a chapter, each hairstyle a footnote, each memory a thread.

Hosted within the community-focused setting of Bromley’s Community House, the exhibition bridges local and diasporic audiences, creating a cultural gathering space centred on pride, identity, and collective history. With high-resolution works available and a digital version viewable online, The Onidiri Hairitage Exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls into global accessibility.
The Onidiri Hairitage Exhibition runs virtually from August 12th to 30th while the physical exhibition holds on August 23rd at the Community House in Bromley, London.
Collectors and enthusiasts are encouraged to explore Atanda’s expanding body of work, which continues to connect global audiences through colour, texture, and cultural reflection.