VALIE EXPORT AT, b. 1940

A pioneer in film, video and installation art, VALIE EXPORT has produced one of the most significant bodies of feminist art in the post-war period. Her groundbreaking films and performances in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a new form of radical, embodied feminism to Europe, examining the politics of the body in relation to its environment, culture and society. The multi-disciplinary nature of EXPORT’s ‘Expanded Cinema’ practice, along with her use of her own body as an artistic medium, positions her among one of the earliest performance artists alongside Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow.

Through her artistic representations of the self, EXPORT

questions the (female) body as signifier and bearer of

information, challenging viewers by examining the politics of eroticism, the male gaze and liberation. In the Body Configurations she began in 1972, EXPORT uses her own body to visualise the internal accommodations made to nature, architecture and culture. Contorted in response to architectural landmarks or the natural environment, the artist undermines the physical boundaries between self and surroundings.

As she explains, ‘This analogy between scenic and bodily

arrangements, these common forms of revealing mood, have served since the beginning of pictorial art as projection surfaces for expression: external configurations, whether they are in the landscape or in the picture serve as the expression of internal states.’