Sorour Fattahi: The Hidden and the Held

Sorour Fattahi stitches her own hair into self-portraits; a thread once tied to beauty, then to loss, and now to quiet resilience. Each strand holds a story of depletion, gathering and renewal, through which she stitches herself back together.

Fattahi’s works explore the fluidity of identity, something that slips, unravels and reforms. Belonging and estrangement, beauty and abjection, loss and strength all coexist in every stitch. The works embody her experience of migration, alopecia, depression and self-perception, becoming a map of the quiet negotiations between the internal and external self.

These works are more than self-portraits; they are acts of mending, naming and returning to self.

Sorour Fattahi, Once Fallen… (Detail), 2025, human hair stitched onto silk organza, 72 x 60cm. Photograph courtesy of the artist.