Art Pioneer VALIE EXPORT Before 85th Birthday

On May 17, the media and performance artist, filmmaker, and feminist theorist VALIE EXPORT celebrates her 85th birthday. Austria's most well-known and influential living artist will be honored on this occasion with a grand celebration at the Belvedere 21 on May 21, organized in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum and sixpackfilm.

Cigarette Pack as a Beginning

Her first object in 1966 was a cigarette pack with her portrait and the artist name inspired by the cigarette brand "Smart Export": VALIE EXPORT. Written in mandatory capital letters, it was meant to serve as an unmistakable statement: Here is someone to be taken seriously! Indeed, subsequent actions like the "Tap and Touch Cinema" (1968), where she allowed her bare breasts to be touched, the crotchless "Action Pants: Genital Panic," or "From the Portfolio of Doggedness," where she led Peter Weibel on a dog leash through downtown Vienna, became icons of feminist art and inspired several generations of female artists.

VALIE EXPORT was born on May 17, 1940, in Linz as Waltraud Lehner. "I grew up in a so-called women's household," she recounted in an APA interview at the turn of the year about her early influences. "My mother was a war widow. We were three sisters, and our mother had to manage life with her three girls. Her goal was for each of her daughters to study, to have a better start and earn their own money. I grew up and was raised with this thought - and I wanted to pass on this thought." Like few others, VALIE EXPORT stands for the unity of social, artistic, and personal upheaval.

As a young woman who attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Linz after convent school, she had a child at 18 (she named her Perdita, the Lost One) and got married. But she soon broke away from her bourgeois existence. In 1960, she moved to Vienna, studied textile design at the Higher Federal Education and Research Institute for the Textile Industry, and connected with the artist circles around the Vienna Group, Art Club, and "Strohkoffer." Due to her "lifestyle," she was deprived of custody of her daughter (who later also became a media artist).

In the environment of Viennese Actionism - she was a member of the "Vienna Institute for Direct Art" founded by Otto Muehl and Günter Brus, along with Peter Weibel, Hermann Nitsch, and Kurt Kren - whose image of women she rejected, she made headlines in the newspapers' chronicle sections with body actions and Expanded Cinema works. In 1970, she presented her first video work "Split Reality" in London, engaged in dialogue with the film avant-garde in the three-part television work "The Armed Eye," and her films "Invisible Adversaries," "Menschenfrauen," and "The Practice of Love" were shown at the Berlin Film Festival.

"Women Have to Fight Again"

Her fundamental artistic concerns - "Body, Concept, Media" - have remained unchanged, as has her fight for emancipation, which today must stand against a societal backlash, according to the artist: "Women have to fight again. That makes me sad and angry because we have really done a lot."

VALIE EXPORT participated in countless international exhibitions, including at the Paris Centre Pompidou, the documenta, and the New York MoMA, as well as international film festivals. In 1980, she was the official representative of Austria at the Venice Biennale with Maria Lassnig, and in 2009 she was a commissioner. From 1991 to 1995, VALIE EXPORT was a professor for design with technical image media, and in 1994/95 also vice president of the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1995 to 2005, she taught as a professor for multimedia performance in Cologne.

VALIE EXPORT Without the Grand Austrian State Prize

In 1995, she was awarded the EA-Generali Sculpture Prize, and in 2000 she received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize as well as the Alfred Kubin Prize. In 2003, the artist received the Golden Medal of Honor of Vienna, in 2005 the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, and in 2009 the honorary doctorate from the University of Art and Design Linz. In 2014, she was honored in New York with the "Courage Award for the Arts" endowed by Yoko Ono, which recognizes courageous artistic creation that defies social or political hurdles. The highest art award in Austria, the Grand Austrian State Prize, "has been denied to me so far," she says.

In the Linz Tobacco Factory, the "VALIE EXPORT Center, Research Center for Media and Performance Art" opened in 2017, equipped with a purchased part of the artist's preliminary estate. "It is very well used and very well received. We also have guest professorships and young female artists writing their master's or diploma theses," the artist is pleased to say. "It is a very lively center." Since last year, there has been the VALIE EXPORT Foundation, which aims to facilitate contact for students and preserve and research the artist's work.

Film to Hit Cinemas Next Year

Under the title "How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT," a volume is soon to be published by spector books, honoring her as "one of the most radical and significant audiovisual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries." "This volume understands her cinematic work as a universe of action options, as a visionary template for the perception and reworking of a society permeated by patriarchal structures," states the book's announcement, to which Elfriede Jelinek also contributes a text. Claudia Müller's film "VALIE EXPORT. The Armed Eye," which is set to hit cinemas in 2026, will primarily focus on her role as an art mediator and curator.

As part of the birthday celebration, international colleagues and companions are set to perform. "Barbis Ruder, Denise Palmieri, and Sophia Süßmilch are developing performative contributions specifically for this occasion, which are in close dialogue with central works by VALIE EXPORT," the announcement states. "Inna Shevchenko will read a text that was created in the context of her feminist artist group Femen." A "subversive film program with cake" is also being prepared. An audio contribution by art historian Katy Hessel is set to honor VALIE EXPORT's contribution to feminist art history.

Among the congratulators is also Belvedere Director General Stella Rollig: VALIE EXPORT has "significantly shaped the art of the 20th and 21st centuries with her cross-media works," she recently stated. "With her uncompromising attitude, intellectual sharpness, and artistic radicality, she has set new standards - not only in feminist art but far beyond."

(APA/Red)

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