Valie Export
b. 1940
Educated in a convent until the age of 14, EXPORT studied painting, drawing, and design at the National School for Textile Industry in Vienna, and briefly worked in the film industry as a script girl, editor, and extra. She married and had two children, but later divorced her husband and returned to art school. In 1967, she changed her name to Valie Export—written in uppercase letters, like an artistic logo—shedding her father’s and husband’s names and appropriating her new surname from a popular brand of cigarettes. With this gesture of self-determination, EXPORT emphatically asserted her identity within the Viennese art scene, which was then dominated by the taboo-breaking performance art of Viennese actionists such as Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Like her male contemporaries, she subjected her body to pain and danger in actions designed to confront the growing complacency and conformism of postwar Austrian culture. But her examination of the ways in which the power relations inherent in media representations inscribe women’s bodies and consciousness distinguishes EXPORT’s project as unequivocally feminist. EXPORT’s early guerilla performan…
Films