Presse

With 200 works by 71 female artists, a new exhibition of pioneering photography was ‘too quiet and poetic’ to be properly appreciated in the 1970s

The Rencontres d’Arles present, for the first time in France, the exhibition A Feminist Avant-Garde: Photographs and performances from the 1970s from the Verbund Collection, Vienna, with over 200 works by 71 female artists. It will be held at Mécanique Générale, Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France until 25 September.
Actionist, provocative and poetic – the exhibition makes clear that the works are drawn from many different schools of feminism.
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The exhibition is divided into five themes: women’s reduction to ‘wife, mother, and housewife’; their resulting feeling of ‘being locked up’; the questioning of ‘dictates of beauty and representations of female bodies’; explorations of ‘female sexuality’; and debates around ‘female roles and identities’. 
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Western countries saw the emergence of the second wave of the women’s movement against a backdrop of the 1968 student movement, the ‘sexual revolution’ and efforts to overcome the traditional moral values of the wartime generation. Women came to see that their problems were not ‘personal’ but instead arose from established social structures of power and dominance. Women in western countries rebelled against legal discrimination which meant that a man, as head of a family, could make far-reaching decisions affecting women and children. (...)"

‘I don’t want to carry the past into the future,’ the Austrian artist and feminist icon VALIE EXPORT told Art Basel recently. This seems surprising, given her 50-year career and her substantial influence on feminist art history. EXPORT is best known for her explicit performances, in which she used her body as a tool to lift the lid on the inherent moral hypocrisies of the 1960s and beyond. - Karim Crippa

Interview: Marie-Dominique Wetzel

BODY OF WORK
"In Österreich wurde sie lange Zeit verkannt bis gefürchtet, international hingegen früh beachtet: VALIE EXPORT, Pionierin der Medienkunst. Ein Interview mit DOROTHEUM myART MAGAZINE über Freiräume und Provokation, über das Sammeln und über Kreditkarten, die unter die Haut gehen."
Interview: Doris Krumpl

The artist VALIE EXPORT donates her complete cinematic oeuvre to the Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna. It includes original negatives as well as screening material of short films and feature films.

"VALIE EXPORT receives the art prize awarded annually since 2014 by the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund."

40 years on, the fight for reproductive rights, and against sexual violence, has never been more pressing
Interview: Alice Butler

Feminist Artist VALIE EXPORT on Why She’s Rebooting Her 1980 Venice Biennale Pavilion
The provocative installation is now on view at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in London.
Interview: Naomi Rea

VALIE EXPORT outraged Viennese society with her fiercely feminist art – then sent her own audience racing for the exit as she paraded in crotchless clothes. Fifty years later, she still likes to shock

Interview with VALIE EXPORT in the Frankfurter Allgemeine by Annabelle Hirsch

Sur le plateau du Plein de Culture, Valérie Duponchelle nous présente son premier coup de coeur de 2018 : l'exposition "Body Configurations" de l'autrichienne VALIE EXPORT à la galerie Ropac, dans le Marais, à Paris.

by Devin Fore