Your Beauty is Our Concern, is a solo debut by celebrated South African photographer Trevor Stuurman. This exhibition unveils a striking new body of limited edition portraiture that deepens Stuurman’s ongoing exploration of beauty as both a personal ritual and a collective cultural practice.
Known for his vibrant visual language and his ability to elevate everyday moments into icons of style and identity, Stuurman here turns his lens toward intimate expressions of self-adornment and community pride.
Your Beauty is Our Concern draws attention to the African salon as a sacred space— which has evolved from places of informal gatherings for braiding and sharing of life, ideas and beauty secrets to vital hubs for socialization, cultural expression, and economic empowerment. These salons and barbershops serve not just as safe spaces but as expansive environments where conversations about life, politics, and the human condition unfold, providing a form of communal therapy.
Writer and editor of Artthob, Nkgopoleng Moloi, reflects on Stuurman’s work as responding to “beauty, as elusive and uncontainable as it is, is often denied to others through oppression and exclusion. And yet the very practices involved in striving for it also contain immense potential for joy, courage, strength and community.”
Trevor Stuurman’s images trace the origins of logo-cutting in hairstyles from soccer subcultures through to its contemporary iterations in street style and pop culture, reframing these expressions as acts of self-styled luxury and authorship.
A standout element of the exhibition is a collaborative work with Wanda Lephoto, titled New Generations, symbolic of the passing down of stories from generation to generation. This image evokes the ancestral weight carried by grooming traditions offering a nod to rock art and African traditions in oral history. Throughout, Stuurman’s approach is both celebratory and introspective, positioning beauty not as a fleeting indulgence but as a democratic and enduring ideal.
Your Beauty is Our Concern affirms glamour as something rooted, accessible, and deeply felt. In foregrounding beauty as a language of identity and connection, Trevor Stuurman invites viewers to consider the salon as not just a site of transformation, but of collective affirmation.
Please hurry along to THK Gallery as you only have until the end of May to see Your Beauty is Our Concern.
WHAT: Trevor Stuurman’s Debut Solo Exhibition, Your Beauty is Our Concern
WHERE: THK Gallery, 52 Waterkant Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: closes 30 May 2025
INFO: T +27(0)76 367 6387 | E office@thkgallery.com | VISIT |
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