VALIE EXPORT (1940–2026)

Whether tattooing a garder-belt onto her thigh before a live audience or wedging her body into the recesses of urban architecture, Valie Export has combated patriarchal structures and cast off inhibitions throughout a career that has consistently refused to conform to any one genre. Perhaps best known for her early experimentations in expanded cinema and her performances of feminist Media Aktionism, Export has amassed a vast oeuvre spanning feature film, digital photography, sculpture and show more installation. Archive amasses all of this material and more, excavating Export’s own collection of documentation, preparatory drawings, scripts, posters, Polaroids, newspaper clippings and correspondence to provide an unprecedented overview. Each step of the creation process for iconic pieces such as “Tap and Touch Cinema,” “Action Pants: Genital Panic” and “BODY SIGN ACTION” are explored along with never-before-seen art objects and brand new pieces, making this volume the definitive Valie Export anthology.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
BookforumJohanna Fateman
The exhibition's massive accompanying catalogue includes essays, an in-depth artist interview, and reproductions of each case across two-page spreads. Constellations of production notes, film stills, correspondence, press clippings, and artworks illuminate a rigorous creative process, and chart her significance as a media-art pioneer. In one case, we see a letter outlining charges against an Austrian television-channel official for broadcasting EXPORT's sexually frank feminist science-fiction film Invisible Adversaries (1976) alongside her hand-annotated treatment for the feature. The letter condemn's EXPORT's movie as obscene, and claim's that the artist's "mental illness exonerates her from responsibility" for the piece. This inclusion, which illustrates the official hositlity to her early work, is an example of the kind of material that distinguishes Archiv. The book is more than just a revealing presentation of her private documentation and radical ephemera; it's EXPORT's contextualization of a brilliant career, always on the front line. show less