Valie Export

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Valie Export (born May 17, 1940 in Linz as Waltraud Lehner) is an Austrian artist. Her artistic work includes video installations, body performances, expanded cinema, computer animations, photography, sculptures and publications covering contemporary arts.

Famous feminist performances in the late 1960s include Tapp- und Tast-Kino ("Touch Cinema"), performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971. In this avowedly revolutionary work, Export built a tiny "movie theater" around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the "theater". She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her.

The contrast with what is usually called "cinema" is obvious, and is crucial to the message. In Export's performance, the female body is not packaged and sold by male directors and producers, but is controlled and offered freely by the woman herself, in defiance of social rules and state precepts. Also, the ordinary state-approved cinema is an essentially voyeuristic experience, whereas in Export's performance, the "audience" not only has a very direct, tactile contact with another person, but does so in the full view of Export and bystanders.

Export's groundbreaking video piece, "Facing a Family" (1971) was one of the first instances of television intervention and broadcasting video art. The video, broadcast on the Austrian television program "Kontake", shows a bourgeois Austrian family watching TV while eating dinner. When other middle class families watched this program on TV, the television would be holding a mirror up to their experience and complicating the relationship between subject, spectator, and television.

Since 1995/1996 Export has held a professorship for Multimedia-Performance at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany.