Curator: Sabine Folie

VALIE EXPORT is considered one of the most important artists working in the fields of conceptual media art, performance art and film. She continues to have an ongoing influence on generations of up-and-coming artists with her feminist and media-critical works. Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) is presenting VALIE EXPORT in a first representative exhibition of works and archival materials at a German institution in 15 years.

From the beginning of her career, EXPORT has been addressing the issues of an increasingly mediatized society and questioning its functions, guiding principles and mechanisms of communication. In 1968, the year when the women’s rights movement and student protests substantially challenged the bourgeois society, EXPORT directed people’s gaze onto the female body – and the social inscriptions it carries – in works such as Tapp und Tastkino or Aktionshose Genitalpanik. But also beyond these now canonical works, EXPORT created a media-reflexive and political oeuvre in the 1980s and 1990s that directs attention to the tension between the individual and society. In the process, the artist simultaneously explored the limits of what can be seen and said, and created connections across media boundaries between seemingly disparate research areas.

The work complexes presented at the n.b.k. stem from five decades and illustrate the diversity of subjects in VALIE EXPORT’s oeuvre. They range from dealing with society‘s thinking and acting in dichotomies like culture / nature or masculine / feminine, to locating the human and above all female subject in the world—within a (constructed) social body that finds it materialization, among other things, in the built city. How architecture, technologies and media (de)form people is the central focus of research in this process. As a result, archival materials and works from the work complex of research on culture and nature from the 1970s are shown as well as those works that focus on the writing subject that constitutes itself in script. In photographs, films and installations from the 1980s and 1990s the artist has been exploring a self that has been fragmented and alienated in the digital age. By creating allegorical images new perspectives are explored, analyzed and exhausted. The exhibition provides insight into VALIE EXPORT’s working process, looks at her practice of questioning space, the body and media, and underlines the research quality of the artistic process.

Together with the artist, the curator Sabine Folie developed an exhibition that—after its first presentation at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz in 2017—will now be shown in an expanded form under the title VALIE EXPORT. Research – Archive – Oeuvre at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Here, the exhibition includes important works by the artist that in a unique way document EXPORT’s creative process and combines them with archival material such as sketches, letters, photos and notes. The archival material comes from the artist‘s pre-mortem bequest, which is being researched under the direction of Sabine Folie at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz since November 2017 and is accessible there to an interested public.

Biography

Since the 1960s, VALIE EXPORT (born in Linz in 1940; lives and works in Vienna) has created an extensive body of work that operates in the fields of performance, experimental film, expanded cinema and conceptual photography as well as addressing art history and feminism with objects and texts. In 2015, EXPORT received the Austrian Frauen-Lebenswerk-Preis (Women‘s Lifetime Achievement Award) as well as the Großes Goldenes Ehrenzeichen (Grand Gold Medal of Honor) of the City of Linz for her achievements in culture. Previously, her artistic practice had been honored with numerous other awards, among them the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts (2014, together with Laurie Anderson, Marianne Faithfull, Gustav Metzger), the österreichisches Ehrenzeichen für Wissenschaft und Kunst (Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, 2005), the Alfred Kubin Prize (2000), the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (2000) and the Gustav Klimt Prize (1998). EXPORT’s works were presented worldwide in numerous solo exhibitions, among them: Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2017; 2010); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); MUSEION Bolzano (2011); österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna (2010); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2004); Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2003); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1980); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1975). Group exhibitions include: Kunsthaus Zürich (2017); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2017); Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2017; 2015; 2014); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016; 2015); Nordstern Videokunstzentrum, Gelsenkirchen (2015); Generali Foundation Vienna (2013). VALIE EXPORT is a two-time participant of the Venice Biennale (exhibition Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense, 2007; Austrian Pavilion, with Maria Lassning, 1980) and of the documenta in Kassel (2007; 1997).

Public Program

Saturday, June 9, 2018, 7 pm

Artist Talk

with VALIE EXPORT, moderated by Sabine Folie (director VALIE EXPORT Center Linz)

In German

Thursday, June 28, 2018, 7 pm

Performative Strategien und das Archiv (Performative Strategies and the Archive)

Panel discussion with Yilmaz Dziewior (art historian and curator, director Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Sigrid Adorf (professor for contemporary art and culture analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), moderated by Bettina Knaup (curator, Berlin and London)

In German

Sunday, August 12, 2018, 8 pm

Peaches

Performance

Admission free for all events

For organizational reasons, the exhibition will be closed on Sunday, August 12, 2018