BEAUTY TEMPLE, participatory installation and performance, 2024
A pop-up beauty salon installed within a gallery offered free hair, nail, and makeup services performed by professional beauty workers.
Presented at Open Source Gallery in New York City from June 15 to July 26, 2024.
The gallery was fully equipped with furniture, tools, and supplies, activated by a team of 4 beauty workers based in NYC: Aub, Mich Li, Jocelyne Rodriguez, and Hannah Lillevoy. Their labor was presented as live performance, and framed as a spiritual service.
By staging labor this way, the work reconfigures the gallery as a site of exchange and transformation, where value circulates through care and attention. Tied to a conceptual series focused on a Brazilian queer clown, turned into a spiritual entity, this project entangles fan fiction, worldbuilding and the politics of labor to create a structure capable of producing collective participation and re-enchantment.
The project proposes an afterlife for Baby Bobolete, a Brazilian queer clown created by Caike Luna (1979–2021). In her performances, Bobolete repeatedly claimed—falsely—that she owned a beauty salon in New York, invoking a fantasy of mobility and success shaped by class and geography. Beauty Temple materializes that fiction, translating it into a functional environment where service, desire, and projection converge.
Alongside the salon, a public program of performances and talks extends the work’s field, including contributions by Celestina, Hannah Lillevoy, and Micca, as well as a series of artist-led discussions on fan fiction, queer labor, and spirituality. The temple's door paintings were designed by Eli Kan.