May 12, 2014

Bearded women calendar from 1997

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:18 pm

women-with-beards-jetty-verhoeff

Women with Beards (note: occasional nudity) was an art project that ran from 1997 to 1998 in which every month a photo and biography of a bearded ‘babe’ was added to a website. Ine Poppe and Jetty Verhoeff ran the project and the beards were applied by make-up artist Ellen Wenniger.

The artists write: “In former days women with beards were exposed as an aberration at fairs. In the 21st century female facial hair will be the ultimate of sexual seductiveness.” And elsewhere they add: “Several articles have by now appeared about our project: they raise questions about our playing with gender. We don’t have a cut-and-dried answer to these: we just want to amuse and entertain. Like Jetty said to a Dutch journalist: ‘In my imagination our calendar is pinned to the wall with scotch tape in a garage in Australia.'”

In 2008 the project was part of the Kiki on Steroids! exhibit (again, NSFW) which explored “the world of transgenderism and self-representation on the Internet”. In this exhibit photos of “hairy babes of the month” were displayed almost life sized over toilets and urinals.

(Illustration: cropped screenshot of the Women with Beards website)

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