Valie Export

A comprehensive documentation of new art movements from 1945 to the present day. Beginning with the "Internationale Situationniste," "Cobra," "Spur," and "Wiener Gruppe" groups in Europe, and moving on to the international Happening and Fluxus movements, including the Viennese Actionists, and from 1970 onward to international Body and Performance Art, which also encompassed media art—film and video—the documentary presents film and photographic material from these art movements.

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"This video film shows indecency in its modern form. While peddling naked female flesh was considered indecent in the past, we can see by the examples of today´s star athletes that skin full of advertising sells better. The same applies to politicians, of course, though in a more subtle way. Advertising on skin as the new indecency! I consider this film to be a continuation of my previous work with the body as a vehicle for social codes. While in the past it was religion that dictated male and female behaviour, which was also expressed in their physical appearance, business has now assumed this role. Business dictates physical behaviour, physical pressure in its most direct form, and even sets standards for how our bodies are to be represented. Religion no longer prescribes morality, that is now done by the global power of business, with its products and codes. Morality has found a new patron." (Valie Export)

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“Writer Elfriede Jelinek has repeatedly made statements about her television-watching habits. She watches a great deal, a wide variety of what is broadcast, though rarely for pleasure or the purpose of gaining knowledge. On the contrary, the TV program is one of her favorite objects of study. Three separate times on a particular day, while sitting in a comfy TV chair, she commented on Austrian TV news for VALIE EXPORT.” – Brigitta Burger-Utzer

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Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

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A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies. Export demonstrates how the body of the consumer, especially that of the female consumer, is co-opted by commercialism. In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects, as a body builder seduces a prostitute at a bar saying, “Your eyes are the most beautiful blue ad-space. Your cheek could promote a Mercedes. Your neck could be a slogan for styled technology.” Export’s work is centered around the evolving role of women in a culture where images increasingly displace material reality. A Perfect Pair wonderfully illustrates the inescapability of advertising’s “regime of signs", the signifying network of personal and product values that is effectively encoded on the space of women’s bodies.

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“The Duality of Nature is an experimental video that deals with the 'duality of nature', in other words natural nature and technical nature. Nature is always a construction, whether in dynamic processes, dis-analog systems or physical, technical signals. 'Nature' formulates the organizational forms of representational strategies - symbolic structures, both in reality and in fiction. Where are the borders, the interfaces, the de-bordering and the analogies for ‘natural’ nature and ‘technical’ nature? These considerations provided the basis for the video.” – VALIE EXPORT

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Judith is a maverick reporter who is also seeking a satisfying relationship with various men. She finds corruption and power-games everywhere.

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The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.

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Menschenfrauen is a film about relationships and the psychological oppression of women in society. Franz, a journalist, maintains relationships with four women. His three mistresses are introduced with television dreams of intense emotional violence (in the first dream, a mother shouts at her daughter, explaining that as a girl, she does not deserve a room of her own), and the fourth is his wife. He is desperate to have each to himself. Franz never offers a substantial sign of love, but is willing to say anything and make any promise for affection. His dependence on women for fulfilment is explained through arguments with his wife. He claims "I am my own sound. The women produce voices within me." An understandable and sometimes sympathetic antagonist is one of the films greatest strengths. The emotional damage he causes becomes believable.

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A work on the perception of space, where a video of a motionless figure in a room correlates four different camera positions with four different synthesized tones. We see the inert artist and how she calmly faces the cameras head-on. Six minute version.

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Adjunct Dislocations II documents a technically inventive performance. VALIE EXPORT moves along a track with two closed-circuit cameras that are facing different directions and are focused upon patterned screens. Her action creates changing linear shapes on monitor banks within the space.

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Set in contemporary Vienna, the film involves a photographer, Anna, who discovers that extraterrestrial beings are colonizing the minds of her fellow citizens by raising the human aggression quotient. The outer world immediately becomes disjointed, yet the inner world does too, as Anna and her lover, Peter, try to hang onto their deteriorating relationship.

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A drama in the continuum of perturbance in the mixed-gender relationship. Based on shoulder and hand symbolism as historical body language, the history of women in the world of men is broken wide open.

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Performance by Valie Export.

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Space Seeing - Space Hearing uses sound and image editing, as well as split-screen effects, to create a performance from a motionless body. The work comprises six distinct sections that create a rhapsody of sound and image. The original full-length/linear film cut of the performance. Later edited into a different six minute work of the same name (released in 1980).

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Tethered to one another by a rope, two figures standing on parallel escalators perform five ways of being together—“against each other,” “with each other,” “to each other,” “for each other,” and “each other”—challenging expectations of how people can and should coexist in public space.

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A densely symbolic video performance that became a scandal in 1977 when Staberl, one of Austria’s most infamous right-wing columnists, attacked Export as a violator of animal rights. Export won the ensuing court case with a beginner’s lesson in filmmaking for the judge and jury…

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“This film deals with exploring one´s surroundings by means of the body, and the exploration of the surrounding body. Not only is something shown in this film, showing itself is shown, not only is something portrayed, portrayal itself is portrayed. A sense of space is created in a way possible only with film: seeing oneself from the front and back simultaneously, from above and below, and from outside in the center of the space. The film combines opposite parts of the space, which form the body´s imperceptible time-space continuum. Space is carried along, just like the camera.” – VALIE EXPORT

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With sometimes painful directness, Valie Export conducts a psychological investigation of the body in this film performance, externalizes an internal state. In front of a police photo showing two children who were sexually abused by their parents, she tortuously cuts into her cuticles until blood drips into a bowl of milk on her lap. On top of the symbolic plane of blood and milk, the physical effect on the viewer of her destructive act of self-mutilation is extreme.

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Man & Woman & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film is a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures... (Joana Kiernan)

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Second version of the video-poem "Visual Text: Finger Poem" (1968), by Valie Export, conceived after the eponymous photo poem from 1968: "I say what is shown in showing what is said" (freely adapted from Martin Heidegger).

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“The narrow passage or dangerous passage is a common motif in both funerary and initiation mythologies. I step inside and move through a corridor of electrically charged wires, constantly experiencing painful shocks and sinking to the floor. But I accept the challenge and, in a somewhat pathological increase in willpower, I press my head against the wires again and again. Society is a closed, structured space, which regulates all human energy through painful barriers. Only through an effort of will to overcome the pain (which is at the core of society) is one able to achieve a state of free expression.” – VALIE EXPORT

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Breath Text is a powerfully simple performance in which VALIE EXPORT creates tension by breathing compulsively. “she breathes heavily at the video camera lens while slowly moving her face across it, fogging up the entire space with her lung’s volume. Her piece takes Olson’s breathy poem ‘Gli Amanti’ a step further, not just aiming to capture the particularities of one’s pronunciation in an individual speech act but substituting the specific make her body creates – her ‘breath text,’ the moist gasp on the window glass in front of her – for the signs one would use to write an actual, linguistic ‘love poem.’” – Lisa Siraganian

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This 16mm film reflects VALIE EXPORT's dialogue with the medium film: "Back then I was occupied with trying to find out how you can use this small machine to do things with various formal, artistic or performance-like sequences on celluloid: cross-fading, rewinding and starting over again, not having any clear pictures. In this project I was interested in moving towards the camera and moving away again."

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"The middle line marking of the road is filmed through the windscreen of a moving car simultaneously with its own reflection in the driving mirror. The repeated interruptions of the space/time line are as big as a car. The car as a connecting link in time. The cinema as interruption of normal time flow.” – VALIE EXPORT

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A family is observed watching television. The viewer becomes the object of the family's gaze, as much as the family is the object of the viewer's gaze.

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1: Touching 2: Boxing 3: Feeling 4: Hearing 5: Tasting 6: Pushing 7: Walking

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The film is ‘shown’ in the dark. But the cinema has shrunk somewhat – only two hands fit inside it. To see (i.e. feel, touch) the film, the viewer (user) has to stretch his hands through the entrance to the cinema. Tap and Touch Cinema is an example of how re-interpretation can activate the public. Extract fom the documentary "Wiener Underground"

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The subtitle of this merry performance is "An Action Text", indicating that the artist's introduction for the vaudeville number was an inflammatory impetus. Export provides precise instructions for the use of a wrapped box of chocolate-covered candy produced by the renowned Viennese company Hofbauer. However, she has not made an advertisement for them and their presentation, but instead, she extols the packqge and confection as a work of art. Severe degradation of the surviving tape further blurs our perceptions.

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One of Valie Export’s first films is a brief and matter-of-fact treatment of lust. The question of whether the man and woman actually had sexual intercourse and who was responsible for the woman´s orgasm remains open.

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The concept of “expanded” cinema developed by Export and Peter Weibel involved radical experiments with the filmic apparatus and materialist investigations of the production of illusion. Abstract Film No. 1 is an example of this critical investigation of the technology of image production. A film projector casts light on a mirror with tinted liquids running across it. The actual image appears as a reflection on a screen—or an abstract film. —Christian Kravagna

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Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

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In her three-part series VALIE EXPORT takes a look at the themes of "staged space - staged time", "real movement - movable reality", and "structural film", a genre which no longer exists on public-service television. Using numerous examples from films prepared for the specific media, for example by Wojciek Bruszewski, Malcolm LeGrice, Sergey Eisenstein, Maya Deren, Kurt Kren, Yvonne Rainer, Anne Severson, Alfred Hitchcock, Linda Christanell, Gary Beydler and Marc Adrian, narrative and non-narrative forms of story-telling are examined and compared. Adrian appears in a live interview, and he attempts to explain the conditions of production, methods and Zeitgeist through his own work, including his first computer film, Random (1963). The advanced level of this film is also indicated by the high density of theoretical quotes from Christian Metz, Charles S. Peirce, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin and Ferdinand de Saussure.

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Katja Raganelli’s sole excursion into the realm of avant-garde cinema was this focus on Austrian experimental film axiom Valie Export. This portrayal of the filmmaker is quite special as it presents Export at a very particular moment in her career, during the shooting of a fiction feature, Menschenfrauen (1980), with which she was able to break into the avant-garde mainstream, shedding the skin of her path-breaking, often performance-based early works.

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Baron Childerich III of Bartenbruch considers himself to be a descendant of the Merovingian dynasty and he has drawn up a chart of marriages and adoptions which show that he is his own father, grandfather, father-in-law, and son-in-law. He aims at achieving the "total family" based on one man. He persuades his french relative, Pippin, to help him. But the latter lets him down and breaks up the family... Among those who belong to the (surrounding) world of the Baron are Dr. Döblinger, a writer, who has formed a band of muggers and Professor Horn, a psychiatrist, who quiets his patients by leading them on nose rings and beating them up... Family satire with numerous personal and literary allusions based on the novel of the Austrian writer, Heimito von Doderer.

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A work on the perception of space, where a video of a motionless figure in a room correlates four different camera positions with four different synthesized tones. We see the inert artist and how she calmly faces the cameras head-on. Six minute version.

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This film is a kind of anthology about Vienna, from the invention of film to the present day. The aim is to break down the usual clichéd "image of Vienna" such as that found in the traditional "Vienna Film" by juxtaposing documentary footage, newly shot material and subjective sequences created by various artists. Individual, self-contained sections of the film gain new meaning within the context of historical material. Familiar sites appear estranged when edited together with historical scenes. Other scenes appear like a persiflage or satirical. The film does not incorporate any commentary whatsoever. It is a collage of diverse materials aimed at conveying a distanced image of Vienna to the viewer

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Performance by Valie Export.

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Space Seeing - Space Hearing uses sound and image editing, as well as split-screen effects, to create a performance from a motionless body. The work comprises six distinct sections that create a rhapsody of sound and image. The original full-length/linear film cut of the performance. Later edited into a different six minute work of the same name (released in 1980).

Open details →

“This film deals with exploring one´s surroundings by means of the body, and the exploration of the surrounding body. Not only is something shown in this film, showing itself is shown, not only is something portrayed, portrayal itself is portrayed. A sense of space is created in a way possible only with film: seeing oneself from the front and back simultaneously, from above and below, and from outside in the center of the space. The film combines opposite parts of the space, which form the body´s imperceptible time-space continuum. Space is carried along, just like the camera.” – VALIE EXPORT

Open details →

With sometimes painful directness, Valie Export conducts a psychological investigation of the body in this film performance, externalizes an internal state. In front of a police photo showing two children who were sexually abused by their parents, she tortuously cuts into her cuticles until blood drips into a bowl of milk on her lap. On top of the symbolic plane of blood and milk, the physical effect on the viewer of her destructive act of self-mutilation is extreme.

Open details →

Man & Woman & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film is a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures... (Joana Kiernan)

Open details →

The film is ‘shown’ in the dark. But the cinema has shrunk somewhat – only two hands fit inside it. To see (i.e. feel, touch) the film, the viewer (user) has to stretch his hands through the entrance to the cinema. Tap and Touch Cinema is an example of how re-interpretation can activate the public. Extract fom the documentary "Wiener Underground"

Open details →

The subtitle of this merry performance is "An Action Text", indicating that the artist's introduction for the vaudeville number was an inflammatory impetus. Export provides precise instructions for the use of a wrapped box of chocolate-covered candy produced by the renowned Viennese company Hofbauer. However, she has not made an advertisement for them and their presentation, but instead, she extols the packqge and confection as a work of art. Severe degradation of the surviving tape further blurs our perceptions.

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Documentary and pseudo-documentary procedures were filmed simultaneously by two cameras from different viewpoints. The material was then divided into phases of movement. In the montage each phase was doubled. The techniques used in this process vary. Also the sound was doubled, again using different techniques. Two realities, differently perceived according to the conditions of this film, were edited into one synthetic reality, where everything is repeated. This doubling up destroys the postulate: identity of copy and image.

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“Writer Elfriede Jelinek has repeatedly made statements about her television-watching habits. She watches a great deal, a wide variety of what is broadcast, though rarely for pleasure or the purpose of gaining knowledge. On the contrary, the TV program is one of her favorite objects of study. Three separate times on a particular day, while sitting in a comfy TV chair, she commented on Austrian TV news for VALIE EXPORT.” – Brigitta Burger-Utzer

Open details →

Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

Open details →

Judith is a maverick reporter who is also seeking a satisfying relationship with various men. She finds corruption and power-games everywhere.

Open details →

In her three-part series VALIE EXPORT takes a look at the themes of "staged space - staged time", "real movement - movable reality", and "structural film", a genre which no longer exists on public-service television. Using numerous examples from films prepared for the specific media, for example by Wojciek Bruszewski, Malcolm LeGrice, Sergey Eisenstein, Maya Deren, Kurt Kren, Yvonne Rainer, Anne Severson, Alfred Hitchcock, Linda Christanell, Gary Beydler and Marc Adrian, narrative and non-narrative forms of story-telling are examined and compared. Adrian appears in a live interview, and he attempts to explain the conditions of production, methods and Zeitgeist through his own work, including his first computer film, Random (1963). The advanced level of this film is also indicated by the high density of theoretical quotes from Christian Metz, Charles S. Peirce, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin and Ferdinand de Saussure.

Open details →

The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.

Open details →

Menschenfrauen is a film about relationships and the psychological oppression of women in society. Franz, a journalist, maintains relationships with four women. His three mistresses are introduced with television dreams of intense emotional violence (in the first dream, a mother shouts at her daughter, explaining that as a girl, she does not deserve a room of her own), and the fourth is his wife. He is desperate to have each to himself. Franz never offers a substantial sign of love, but is willing to say anything and make any promise for affection. His dependence on women for fulfilment is explained through arguments with his wife. He claims "I am my own sound. The women produce voices within me." An understandable and sometimes sympathetic antagonist is one of the films greatest strengths. The emotional damage he causes becomes believable.

Open details →

A work on the perception of space, where a video of a motionless figure in a room correlates four different camera positions with four different synthesized tones. We see the inert artist and how she calmly faces the cameras head-on. Six minute version.

Open details →

Set in contemporary Vienna, the film involves a photographer, Anna, who discovers that extraterrestrial beings are colonizing the minds of her fellow citizens by raising the human aggression quotient. The outer world immediately becomes disjointed, yet the inner world does too, as Anna and her lover, Peter, try to hang onto their deteriorating relationship.

Open details →

Space Seeing - Space Hearing uses sound and image editing, as well as split-screen effects, to create a performance from a motionless body. The work comprises six distinct sections that create a rhapsody of sound and image. The original full-length/linear film cut of the performance. Later edited into a different six minute work of the same name (released in 1980).

Open details →

A densely symbolic video performance that became a scandal in 1977 when Staberl, one of Austria’s most infamous right-wing columnists, attacked Export as a violator of animal rights. Export won the ensuing court case with a beginner’s lesson in filmmaking for the judge and jury…

Open details →

The subtitle of this merry performance is "An Action Text", indicating that the artist's introduction for the vaudeville number was an inflammatory impetus. Export provides precise instructions for the use of a wrapped box of chocolate-covered candy produced by the renowned Viennese company Hofbauer. However, she has not made an advertisement for them and their presentation, but instead, she extols the packqge and confection as a work of art. Severe degradation of the surviving tape further blurs our perceptions.

Open details →