The satirical beauty salon installation is part of the ‘Beauty Fall’ exhibition by artist, Sabrina Tirvengadum, which also features its own interactive AI beauty booth analysis, a tongue-in-cheek beauty magazine and a series of AI-generated lenticular adverts alongside 3D-printed portraits of the artist’s grandparents exploring themes of heritage, beauty and identity.
The newly launched ‘Beauty Fall’ exhibition is on at SPACE Ilford until October 2026 and explores how idealised beauty standards, shaped by Western industry and social media, impact self-esteem and distort identity. Marginalising people across identities and appearances, these systems challenge visitors to question how beauty is measured and whether it can be reclaimed today.
The exhibition reveals aspects of beauty culture that are typically concealed. Advertisements are presented with their underlying messages exposed, and beauty products are labelled to expose their true impact.
Central to the exhibition is a series of works that encourage visitors to confront their own reflections. This includes an interactive beauty booth encouraging visitors to sit down and undergo an unsettling AI beauty analysis that analyses your features and face in real time before providing you with an ‘optimal’ AI enhanced version of yourself at the end.
Sabrina’s exploration of measurement is grounded in personal and ancestral history. She has worked with archival family photographs to trace how colonial documentation recorded, categorised, and often erased those it claimed to represent. 3D-printed beauty masks of the artist’s grandparents are displayed in the space, serving as witnesses to ancestors and communities deliberately excluded.
For ‘Beauty Fall’, the artist contacted an existing ‘glow up service’ to create an ideal version of herself (pictured in the Fall section of the beauty magazine featured in the exhibition). She then used the resulting images to create a series of AI faux advertisements. These use lenticular prints to reveal contrasting headlines such as ‘Whiten Your Skin,’ ‘Conform’ and ‘Erase Who You Are’ as you walk past, unmasking the colonial and sinister marketing behind much of the beauty industry and advertising we continue to be surrounded by today.
Pressure to conform to set beauty standards can lead us to alter or hide our features, risking a loss of connection to both ourselves, our sense of identity, and our ancestors. Reclaiming our reflection restores this connection and resists erasure, and the exhibition encourages visitors to value traits inherited from their ancestors that beauty culture often seeks to erase.