Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) at Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

Cuban artist Ana Mendieta’s (1948–1985, Cuba)early series Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972, documents a performance in which she glued fragments of her fellow student Morty Sklar’s beard onto her own female face, highlighting the idea that binary gender classifications are social constructions that frame and overdetermine sexualities. By hybridising her identity, Mendieta problematised those classifications, suggesting that so-called masculine identity as expressed throughfacial hair is nothing but artifice.

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.