A Day in the Life: Ponita Keo

On Cambodia’s salons, ‘The hair between us’ and ‘Beauty and the Pigs’

A Day in the Life is a series by A&M where we invite practitioners to share a day in their life.

Ponita Keo. Image courtesy of the artist.

Ponita Keo is a Cambodian documentary artist, producer, production designer and writer based between Phnom Penh and Paris. Her recent project, The hair between us (2026), tells the story of her grandmother and mother, and expands into the study of hair across Cambodian society. It received the 8th Objectifs Documentary Award (Open Category) in 2025 and was presented as a solo exhibition in 2026. An earlier series, Beauty and the Pigs (2023), follows the Kan sisters of Battambang, one of Cambodia’s principal rice-growing provinces. As floods and droughts disrupt the rain-fed cycle of sowing and harvest, the three women supplement their farming with pig-rearing and a small beauty salon at home. Developed with the support of Noor Images through its 2023 Visualising Climate Crisis programme, the series was nominated for the 2024 Leica Oskar Barnack Award. 

In this edition of A Day in the Life, Ponita shares how her mother’s dressing table and stack of old salon magazines fed into the making of The hair between us (2026), and reflects on the project’s next phase.

Ponita Keo, The hair between us, 2026, photography and installation, solo exhibition, Chapel Gallery, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Image courtesy of Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film.

Presented at the Objectifs - Centre for Photography in Film, Singapore, as part of the 8th Objectifs Documentary Award, The hair between us (2026), curated by Syaheedah Iskandar, forms part of an ongoing exploration of hair and the powers it carries. The work stems from a personal fascination with hair salons, a curiosity about the women around me, and the ways in which hair has become a point through which they negotiate agency and reclaim their identities. In the process, I began to question my own relationship with hair.

Ponita Keo, The hair between us, 2026, vinyl print 160cm x 240cm, Objectifs Centre for Photography in Film, Chapel Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.

My mother’s dresser has held an invisible power over me. It is a sanctuary in which she becomes herself through a controlled and decades-old routine. I was able to capture this routine in the process. It was a cathartic experience, probably because over time, it made me realise where the root of our tensions lie: hair — what it means to us both, and the contradictions of those meanings. I began to question it as its own entity, and its potential to both bind and break.

“My studio, I suppose, at least when I am not using it to sleep.” Image courtesy of the artist.

I work best in the comfort of my bed… or any bed, comfortable or not. Essentially, anywhere I am able to find temporary refuge, the “studio” transforms into an expansive and mobile canvas where sounds, images and shower thoughts coalesce (on a good day) or tangle into confusion (on a bad day). I work through encounters, then later reconstruct them from memory. But I do not always trust my memory, so I return to those moments again and again until something clicks. The bed is also where I sleep; it is sometimes during lucid dreams that things begin to form.

“Once upon a time, magazines like these that featured stars with overcoiffed hairs, piled over counters in hair salons. Some still have them, but most no longer do. A salon owner was kind enough to donate a pile to me.” Image courtesy of the artist.

Found objects hold on to versions of familiar worlds. Such old magazines become relics of contemporary society. For my work about hair, they carry ideas of beauty that exist and will continue to exist within us. Coming from both journalism and anthropology, there has been some tension between objectivity and interpretation. By collecting,  though some may say hoarding, the objects, I document, remember and interpret all at the same time.

“An image from a test shoot with a new friend, whose name I’ve forgotten. But as a non-person, I don’t think they care very much.” Image courtesy of the artist. 

The hair between us (2026) started by looking at hair as a marker of identity, a form of self-expressions, control and freedom. This next phase is a work in progress, seeing hair as it flutters across different spaces, mediums and iterations. Similarly, its social meaning seems to shift. Once a part of the living body, it now transposes as an economic object. A thing, disembodied the moment it enters a wider system of the economic processes of labour, production, and circulation. But as we speak, even alienated from its host, it is beginning to reveal itself as more than just a thing.

To see more of Ponita’s work, follow her on Instagram or visit her website.