VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT is a pioneer of media art, working with photography, sculpture, performance, installations, and concepts. The focus of her artistic exploration is social criticism and the female body. Conventions and contemptuous image types have historically forced the latter’s adaptation and subjugation. VALIE EXPORT fights back with a critique that questions the reification of the feminine. “Art,” VALIE EXPORT says, “sharpens our perception and therefore manifests transformative and subversive potential.” In spring 2023, we are presenting a spontaneous collaboration.

VALIE EXPORT is developing an installation with organ pipes from the inventory of the pilgrimage church on the Pöstlingberg in her hometown, Linz, for the Kunsthaus Bregenz. The artist has selected an arrangement of Charles Mingus’s Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me to be played on the expansive instrument. Mingus’s song, first recorded in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, is both prayer and oppressive indictment. The African American jazz musician intones the fears of that time, which could not be more relevant today. Reverberation and droning on the first floor of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, its ambience a cross between church space and industrial hall, amplify this moving music ranging from invocation to threatening despair.

Biography

VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Linz) Media artist, performance artist, and filmmaker. Having lived and worked in the USA and Germany, VALIE EXPORT is now based in Vienna.

In 1967, VALIE EXPORT invented her sobriquet as an artistic concept and logo, which she permitted to be written only in capitals. The artist participated in documenta 6 in 1977 and documenta 12 in 2007, in Kassel. In 1980 she represented Austria, together with Maria Lassnig, at the Biennale di Venezia. For her outstanding artistic achievements, VALIE EXPORT was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2019 and the “Golden Nica” Prix Ars Electronica in 2020, while also receiving the Max Beckmann Prize from the City of Frankfurt in 2022.

VALIE EXPORT has already been shown at Kunsthaus Bregenz in her solo exhibition Archive, in 2011.