VALIE EXPORT’s work since the 1960s was shown throughout Camden Arts Centre’s galleries, in the first major survey in the UK of this ground breaking and influential Austrian artist.
VALIE EXPORT has consistently experimented with different forms and media to create challenging and thought-provoking works that continue to resonate today.
VALIE EXPORT is a pioneer of performance and media art whose practice has exerted a considerable influence on a subsequent generation of artists. She came to prominence with performative works which confronted the objectification of women’s bodies in society and established her reputation as a leading feminist artist. This touring show brings together works by VALIE EXPORT from 1967 to the present, representing the main elements of her diverse practice, including drawings, performances, conceptual photographs, Expanded Cinema, videos and installations.
In 1967, VALIE EXPORT created a new identity for herself, adopting a name based on a popular brand of cigarettes (Smart Export). During this period, she made a series of photographs in which her own body became the focus of an investigation into the theme of ‘identity’. Her Body Configurations series (1972-82) examines how the relationship between internal and external states is mediated by the physical body.
In her conceptual photographs of the 1970s, VALIE EXPORT experimented with the formal and material possibilities of the medium, using serial photography and montage techniques to explore different spatial and temporal views of familiar objects. A similar experimentation is evident in her Expanded Cinema works.
Throughout her career, VALIE EXPORT has been a leading innovator in the use of technology in the visual arts. One of her earliest video installations, the interactive Autohypnosis (1969), is recreated especially for this exhibition.
A selection of short films, many documenting VALIE EXPORT’s seminal performance pieces from the late 1960s were screened in the Artists’ Studio during the exhibition.
In conjunction with the exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, VALIE EXPORT’s installation The Power of Speech (2002) was shown at the Freud Museum, 10 September – 31 October 2004.
A season of VALIE EXPORT film screenings curated by Mark Webber was hosted by the National Film Theatre, London, 14 – 20 October 2004.
A group exhibition, ‘I am not a feminist. I am normal’, reflects on how a younger generation of artists unpacks concepts which VALIE EXPORT established at the forefront of her practice.
VALIE EXPORT was curated by Caroline Bourgeois and Juan Vicente Aliaga.
