Valie EXPORT

Valie EXPORT is a prolific contemporary artist who transformed herself into a brand identity.  EXPORT’s art explores the nexus of relationships including experience, politics and personal identity. EXPORT continually uses the body in performance as a means of investigating physical and psychological limits and challenging false egalitarianism of gender and sexist ideologies that subsequently characterize society. EXPORT explores and radicalises questions surrounding the artist representation of mental states and the conditioning of reality. Through her means of performance, experimental films, and conceptual photographs trying to separate the female body from eroticism, EXPORT created contradiction by exploiting her body directly without mediation. Her paradoxical affirmation of the self and body by a masochistic fragmentation and exposure, ultimately confronts the public with a provocative, aggressive and invasive attempt to question their physical and mental identity.

 Articulating one of EXPORT’s most emblematic performance works,  Cinema 1968. EXPORT provocatively sought to reverse the cinematic experience and voyeurism of watching sexually portrayed images of women.1 For EXPORT, the interaction of the human body and its media image motivates her performances to communicate a direct analogy between the cinema screen and the human skin. This confrontation challenges the perceived cliché of the representation of women passively displayed as object of pleasure, creating a relationship with the body on proximity and intimacy rather than voyeurism and visual mastery of the cinematic experience.

Rather than the viewer anonymously engaged in spurious pleasure, EXPORT entices the public to feel her breasts the “real thing” within a strapped on box over her bare chest reminiscing a cinematic theatre. Dependent on soliciting public participation collaborator Peter Weibel invited members of the public upon the streets in Vienna, to exclusively access her body for physical public molestation.  EXPORT who resembled a mannequin wearing a wig activated a space which the beholders hands caressed her breasts, an act of sexual freedom. For export, the tactility of this performance was framed to directly confront social prescriptions prevailing patriarchal ownership of women.   This subjective experience is an example of how reinterpretation can activate the public.

My interest in this artist is for her performance and intent notion of personal identity embedded in her oeuvre. Her radical and