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"In China zum Beispiel gibt es kaum Frauenbiografien aus dieser Zeit. Ich sagte, das kann doch nicht wahr sein, habt ihr wirklich gründlich genug gesucht? Und es stellte sich heraus, dass es aus dieser Zeit tatsächlich keine Biografien gibt, außer von einigen Konkubinen und Kaiserinnen. Das war's. Noch vor einem guten Jahrhundert hatten Frauen dort keinen Namen, keinen Status und wurden komplett marginalisiert - wie Vieh."
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The project Woman to Go, which ter Hejine began in 2005 and continues to work on in various forms, is dedicated to forgotten biographies such as these. The idea behind the installations, of which the most recent version is presented in Deutsche Bank's new Amsterdam offices, seems at first rather simple: hundreds of postcards stacked in wall racks are offered for the taking, free of charge. On the front of the cards are photographs of unknown women taken between 1839 and 1920. On the backs are biographies from this era, which obviously, however, are unconnected to the photographs. A basic idea in the work is that the effect exerted by the portraits and biographies is heightened by this very discrepancy. Frequently, these biographies chart the adventurous lives of unusual women all over the world-artists, tea traders, pirates, writers, researchers, partisans, suffragettes. All of them were pioneers whose achievements were overlooked by the "official" version of history. On her journeys around the globe, for years ter Heijne pored through used book stores and flea markets, researched with students in archives, searched the Internet. "In China, for example, there are hardly any women's biographies from this time at all. I said to them, but that can't be, did you really look hard enough? And it turned out that there really weren't any biographies from this time, except for a small number of concubines and empresses. That's where it ends. Up until only around a century ago, women there had no name, no status, and were completely marginalized-as if they were livestock."
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