Valie Export

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 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.

Having quickly tired of life as an editor and extra in the Austrian film industry, in 1967 Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to Valie Export and plunged into the violent and often blood-soaked world of Viennese performance art and the extremist "Actions" of Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Like them, Export subjected her body to pain, but where their work was inevitably drawn towards a religious idea of catharsis, Export politicized the inscription of women's bodies in terms of media representation, declaring her project as explicitly feminist. Export soon turned to video to record her performances and began to remove her person from her work, as in her now-famous 1971 video "Facing a Family." Today, across more than four decades of activity, Export has built a large and rigorous oeuvre comprising performance, photography, film and media installations. This volume surveys her career.