Hendrik Quast

Hendrik Quast’s hair abandoned him, right when he most longed for glorious locks to help him slip into his new role in the art world and climb the social ladder. To secure his place in the middle class, Quast needed a defensive (hair)line! As he learned from Simba in The Lion King, a full mane symbolizes status and class. So Hendrik Quast got himself a hair transplant. This phase of his hair-story was bloody, painful, expensive and risky: The surgery as a durational performance used real, home-grown hair—no wigs here, folks! Would his working-class roots nourish the newly planted hairs? Can hereditary hair loss be overcome this way? What remains, if his chronically ill body rejects the new hair? In a madcap performance, Hendrik Quast uses his scalp to explore his hair-itage. Combining elements of stand-up, musicals and body art, he sheds light on the contradictory nature of his queer and shame-filled journey across class boundaries. Quast brings the ghosts of his experience of class mobility on stage, caught between his roots and the future, questioning the price of social rise, redistributes its costs and ows nothing to anyone.