"I found peace here": in artistic residency in Monaco, Ivorian artist Lætitia Ky sculpts beauty with her hair

A roller coaster, that's how Lætitia Ky defines her career. Her work has been noted in the art world for the originality and power of her photographs. Images she composes alone, staging herself in front of the camera surrounded by shapes she braids, sculpts with her hair: a dove, an umbrella, a face, a logo. Beneath the amusement, her approach further recounts the twists and turns of her thoughts.

"The common thread has always been to advocate for Black beauty. A beauty that I rejected for a long time because I grew up in Ivory Coast in an environment that pushed me to reject it. Around me, all the women were straightening their hair with a chemical product. A routine that I was made to start at the age of five. And I built my personality around the fact that ideal hair must be straight. It's not very positive for self-esteem and I was a very self-conscious teenager."

“I wanted to push my limits”

Diktats are tenacious in Ivorian culture, where natural, frizzy hair is seen as unsightly. The teenager began to question herself the day she lost a quarter of her hair due to a hairstyle that was too tight on a suffering scalp. "I searched on YouTube for how to grow my hair back and came across videos of women from the African-American community. I was sixteen, and it was the first time I'd seen Black women with natural hair and being happy. It made me wonder why we were trying to alter our nature."

Lætitia Ky then decided to shave her head, to start from scratch. And it was images—once again—of hairstyles worn by women in pre-colonial West Africa that guided her toward natural braids. "They were like abstract sculptures made with hair. In these societies, hair wasn't just aesthetic; it allowed people to communicate their social class, their ethnicity, their profession. It made me want to experiment."

She became her own model, weaving her hair with extensions according to her ideas and struggles, to create shapes on her head with which she photographed herself. She published the result on Instagram. "At first it was geometric shapes, then I wanted to push my limits by imagining more sophisticated things, even if I did everything in a homemade way, photographing myself with my phone, using the self-timer and the colorful walls of our house as a backdrop."

One day, a series of images in which she imagined a second pair of hands with her hair surrounding her face went viral. As is often the case in the digital world, the machine quickly got out of control. The young woman abandoned her marketing studies just as the doors to the art world opened. "Being an artist wasn't a career for my parents. But working in an office wasn't the life I wanted, and my mother understood that. With that first series of viral photos, I felt deep down that I was onto something that would allow me to make a living from it."

The Elite agency spotted her to represent her country in a competition. Then an Italian gallery selected her to take part in the prestigious Venice Biennale in 2022, where Lætitia Ky discovered her works for the first time hanging on the walls of an exhibition hall.

"Many things revolt me"

The Venice episode acts as a self-confidence booster, which is reflected in her work, which is now followed by half a million people on Instagram. "When I look at my first images, there was nothing political, but as soon as a few went viral, I received a lot of messages from Black women, especially from the United States and France, who told me that seeing my photos gave them the confidence to love their hair and skin. I wasn't aware of this effect and I wanted to put more intention into it. I've always been a loudmouth, it came quite naturally, because many things revolt me, especially the treatment of African women. African or not, for that matter. Women's inequality is everywhere. I've witnessed so many injustices that revolted me."

Her braids tell a story in each photo, directly or subtly denouncing male predominance. And praising the Black female body on a path marked out in particular by the iconic Naomi Campbell, Beyoncé or Rihanna, who have done their part for the acceptance of Black beauty. "Even if," the artist qualifies, "these women are obliged to conform to certain standards that are not those of Black beauty. We will never see Beyoncé or Rihanna, whom I adore, with an afro. And that's not a problem, because they are free to wear what they want, but it says a lot that even Black icons adopt codes that are not what we are naturally. I like the actress Lupita Nyong'o who shows herself naturally. As a little girl, I didn't have an example of a woman who completely accepts everything that it represents to be Black."

"In Monaco, I found peace"

In Monaco, where she is in residence until September in one of the national studios loaned to artists from various backgrounds, Lætitia Ky has produced a series of photographs combining her techniques. "I like to define myself as a versatile artist. I use several mediums, I paint, I write, even if I am known for sculpting my hair," she recalls.

Photographing herself in the studio or in the streets of Monaco adorned with her hairstyles, she then reworked the images, intervening with paint to create pieces halfway between photography and canvas, which are particularly successful. A new format of expression liberated in the Principality, where the artist settled. "I found calm here, I breathed, I recharged my batteries."

She was also able to go to Cannes last May, where the film Promised Heaven , in which she stars, was selected for the Film Festival. Another braid in her hair, that of an actress. What direction for her career? "I have very little long-term vision," she warns. "I go with the flow, but I have little things that tell me that I'm on the right track."