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“THE POSITION OF ART IN THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS THE POSITION OF WOMAN IN THE ART MOVEMENT.” (VALIE EXPORT, Woman’s Art, A Manifesto, 1972)
“VALIE EXPORT — Semper et ubique — always and everywhere.” With this motto, the Austrian media and performance artist VALIE EXPORT established herself in the international art world in 1967 — and in a single gesture shed both her father’s bourgeois name and that of her ex-husband. Her self-determined name — always written in capitals — was chosen in reference to the Smart Export cigarette brand produced in her hometown of Linz, and she made it a programme for everything that was to follow. Her radical work, her uncompromising engagement with female identity and representation, her break with social, sexual and cultural conventions and taboos, and her consistent artistic use of her own body made her one of the leading and most influential figures in feminist art worldwide.
With early performances such as Action Pants: Genital Panic, the Expanded Cinema Tap and Touch Cinema (1968) — in her own words the “1st Real Women’s Film” — or From the Portfolio of Doggedness (1968), EXPORT unsettled the patriarchal male society of the postwar era; in 1972 she published her manifesto Woman’s Art — yet was not represented at that same year’s documenta 5. She later expanded her multimedia practice to encompass video art, feature film direction, conceptual photography, computer art and installation.
Manfred Schneckenburger’s “Media documenta” of 1977 finally secured the video pioneer her first appearance in Kassel. At the invitation of Wulf Herzogenrath, a selection of her tapes formed part of the “Videothek” on the top floor of the Museum Fridericianum, where they could be viewed on request by visitors on cathode-ray monitors — among them the works Seeing Space and Hearing Space as well as the actions Asemia, Body Politics and Hyperbulia — a physically extreme video performance in which EXPORT moves naked through a narrow obstacle course of electrically charged wires.
Thirty years later she was represented in Kassel for a second time: as part of the documenta 12 (2007) fringe programme, Alexander Horwath, then director of the Austrian Film Museum, presented a film selection of 94 artists and directors in total at the Gloria cinema under the title “Zweimal Leben – Second Lives.” On two evenings, EXPORT’s early video work Remote… Remote… (1973) was screened — a piece that renders visible the connections between experienced trauma, bodily memory and female experience through acts of auto-aggressive self-injury to her own fingernails.
VALIE EXPORT also reached further milestones as a curator. In 1975 she organised the exhibition MAGNA. Feminism: Art and Creativity at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan — the first exhibition in Austria to show exclusively work by women. In 2009 she co-curated, together with Silvia Eiblmayr, the Austrian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, selecting the artists Elke Krystufek, Dorit Margreiter, and Lois and Franziska Weinberger. In 1980 she had herself shown work in the pavilion alongside Maria Lassnig — as the first women ever to do so.
With the founding of the VALIE EXPORT Center in 2015, a circle was closed: the institution, today dedicated to preserving her archive and researching her life’s work, is located at the very site where Smart Export cigarettes were produced and distributed for decades — the Tabakfabrik Linz, built between 1929 and 1935 to designs by Peter Behrens.
VALIE EXPORT died on 14 May 2026, just three days before her 86th birthday.