VALIE EXPORT Background VALIE EXPORT was born in

VALIE EXPORT

Background… • VALIE EXPORT, was born in Linz, 1940, as Waltraud Lehner. • She is an Austrian artist. She was educated in convent until she as 14 and studied painting, drawing and design at national school for textile industry in Vienna. • She invented her artist name as an artist concept logo, only to be written in capital letters, in 1967. instead of going by her fathers name of ‘Lehner’ or her husbands name ‘Hillinger’ she decided to take the name of a popular cigarette brand. • When growing up there was still an essence of the Nazi ideologies of women in society, which has influenced her works.

• Her work consists of; video environments, digital photography, installation, body performances, feature films, experimental films, documentaries, Expanded Cinema, conceptual photography, body-material interactions, Persona Performances, laser installations, objects, sculptures, texts on contemporary art history and feminism. • She is one of the most important pioneers on conceptual media art, performance and film. • "There was a great campaign against me in Austria. ”

Export used the Viennese art scene to influence her identity within art, which was then dominated by the taboo-breaking performance art of the Vienna Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler…… Günter Brus https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=7 OXww. Tv. GMkc Hermann Nitsch Otto Mühl Rudolf Schwarzkogler

Some of her work… Hyperbulie (1973) Peter Weibel From the Underdog File Valie Export playfully and provocatively radicalizes the relationship between the sexes by taking to an extreme women's liberation from male oppression. she demonstrates how thoroughly our bodies and minds are restrained by the social system by moving naked through a corridor of wires charged with electric current, crawling on all fours. She touches the wires over and over, collapsing in pain. These gender transfer images call into question conventional gender roles and reflect a moment in history when male and female clothing and hairstyles merged.

• VALIE EXPORT is well known for her feminist performances, and some images have become iconic such as this one where she is sat on a bench with her legs spread and the crotch of her trousers cut out. • Export said "I felt it was important to use the female body to create art. I knew that if I did it naked, I would really change how the (mostly male) audience would look at me. There would be no pornographic or erotic/ sexual desire involved--so there would be a contradiction. “ • Her touch cinema was performed in citys in Europe, and consisted of people on the street participating by putting their hands into a cardboard box strapped to EXPORTS bare chest. • She also performed in an art cinema in Munich by wearing crotch less pants and walking though the audience so her exposed self was at face level.

"Touch Cinema". The box had holes in the front so that spectators could stick their hands through. She told the spectators "This box is the cinema hall. My body is the screen. But this cinema is not for looking--it is for touching. " Export tried to create a contradiction, by taking a very erotic part of the body and offering it the way she wanted to people. The box and her blatant offering defused the situation from any eroticism. https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=JGv 7 F_Sr. Yk

"Facing a Family" (1971) The video, shows a bourgeois Austrian family watching TV while eating dinner. When other middle-class families watched this program on TV, the television would be holding a mirror up to their experience and complicating the relationship between subject, spectator, and television. Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations) She used her body to explore the relationship between shapes of architecture and the womans body

Thank you Yasmin Clarke India Jones