VALIE EXPORT Film & Video

Heavily antagonized in Austria during the early phases of her career, VALIE EXPORT is now being recognized as one of the foremost international artists to combine (multi-)media art with feminist concerns.

Her influence as an artist, teacher and public figure has steadily grown since 1967, when she programmatically chose a pseudonym to establish a symbolical distance from the identity assigned to her as a woman artist within a male dominated society. Her means of expression range from drawings and conceptual photography to installations, sculptures and performances.

But her use of moving images is arguably at the center of her work. From the very beginning, the image and the conditions of its use in mass media have been pivotal to her art. EXPORT’s interest in the structures, the technology and the functions of film and video imagery is dialectically bound to her interrogations of the female body.

The split between reality and representation is always written on the body, as “something that seems autonomous, even though it is part of society as well”.

This extensive theatrical presentation of VALIE EXPORT’s film and video work is the first show of its kind in Austria. It covers the transgressive (filmed) Actions and 8mm films of the late 1960s (TAPP und TASTKINO, Orgasmus), her radical performance films (Mann & Frau & Animal, ...Remote...Remote...), her narrative features such as Unsichtbare Gegner (1977) or Die Praxis der Liebe (1985), and her documentary work, mostly made in collaboration with Austrian television and including films about Elfriede Jelinek, Oswald Wiener, the history of avant-garde film and the international legacy of Actionism and Body Art. A special, one-of-a-kind program on May 30th will be devoted to EXPORT’s live reconstruction of her Expanded Cinema works from the period 1967-73.

The retrospective is a collaboration between Österreichisches Filmmuseum, sixpackfilm and the Wiener Festwochen. Supported by the Generali Foundation and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Curated by Brigitta Burger-Utzer.