After initially being met with a great deal of hostility, VALIE EXPORT is now considered one of the most important and influential artists to combine multimedia works and theory with a feminist approach.

In 1967 she programmatically chose a pseudonym to symbolically distance herself from the identity and role assigned her as a female artist working in a male dominated society. The forms she employed to express her ideas range from drawings, sculpture and conceptual photography to installations and performances. Moving images in film and video play a central role in her work, and images and how they are presented in the media were her themes from the very beginning. Her interest in the structure, technology and effect of moving images is juxtaposed with the human body as part of an existence divided between reality and representation. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)

 

The selection of short films and one feature film represents over forty years of artistic activity of VALIE EXPORT. The selection includes experimental film and video studies, video performances, feminist media critiques as well as the practice of expanded cinema, ranging from 16 mm film, the first video systems to research of images with medical shooting techniques. Whether conceived for a cinema hall, exhibition space or television, selected video works and films of VALIE EXPORT show the specificity of her poetics and approach when it comes to thinking about the forms of moving images and the possibility of their extensions in space and time: ”I always see film as a sculpture that, for me, has varying levels of ways of observing it. I have found a way to continue expanded cinema in my physical performances in which I, as the centre point for the performance, position the human body as a sign, as a code for social and artistic expression.” VALIE EXPORT “Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality”

VALIE EXPORT (Waltraud Lehner in 1940, Linz) began her artistic practice during the 1960s in Austria, and her early performances and actions in public provocatively re-examined the ways in which the body, especially the female body, is presented in conventional films and media. The name VALIE EXPORT she has been used since 1967 as an artistic concept and gesture of opposition to patriarchal structures. During her artistic career through various media, as well as within theoretical and pedagogical work, she continuously indicates the importance of the feminist perspective. Dealing with the reality of the female body in her performances and films EXPORT has pushed the boundaries of chosen media and artistic expressions having as a central place in her work the concept of “expanded cinema” and, in that sense, intensive research of interactive and intersubjective potential of film experiences. VALIE EXPORT is a co-founder of the Association of Austrian Filmmakers (1968) and has participated in numerous video and film festivals around the world as well as in major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1980, 2009) and documenta (1977, 2007). She has lectured at the Institute of Art in San Francisco, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and until 2005 held a professorship for multimedia performance at the Art university for media in Cologne. For her work to date, VALIE EXPORT has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2019 Roswitha Haftmann Prize recognizing outstanding achievements in the visual arts, the Lebenswerk-Preis (Lifetime Achievement Award) from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education and Women’s Affairs and the Gold Decoration of Honor of the City of Linz for Services to Culture in 2015, the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts (2014, together with Laurie Anderson, Marianne Faithfull, Gustav Metzger), the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2005), the Alfred Kubin Prize (2000), the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (2000) and the Gustav Klimt Prize (1998). She lives and works in Vienna.
www.valieexport.at

 

Wednesday 28th and Thursday 29th July from 7pm to 10pm
Gallery – legacy of Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković

 

Speakers: Brigitta Burger – Utzer (co-founder and director of sixpackfilm (1990-2020), curator, author), Dagmar Schink (Managing Director, VALIE EXPORT Center Linz), Dejan Vasić (independent curator and editor of the art program of CZKD), Miroslav Karić (curator of MSU)

 

Film screenings

 

Wednesday, July 28

Syntagma, 1984, 20 min
Raumsehen und Raumhören / Space Seeing – Space Hearing, 1973-1974, 6 min
Facing a Family, 1971, 5 min
Adjungierte Dislokationen / Adjunct Dislocations, 1973, 10 min
Elfriede Jelinek: News from Home 18.8.88, 1988, 30 min
The voice as performance, act and body, 2007, 11min 34 sec

 

Thursday, July 29

Unsichtbare Gegner / Invisible Adversaries, 1977, 110 min

 

Thematic talks on the artistic practice of VALIE EXPORT will be held before the screenings of the films, starting at 7 pm.

The event is realized in cooperation between Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, the Austrian Cultural Forum Belgrade and the distribution company sixpackfilm from Vienna.

Photo: VALIE EXPORT, TAPP und TASTKINO, 1968, Austria, photo courtesy: sixpackfilm