Author Description

VALIE EXPORT is considered one of the most important artists working in the fields of conceptual media art, performance art and film. She continues to have an ongoing influence on generations of up-and-coming artists with her feminist and media-critical works. Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) is presenting VALIE EXPORT in a first representative exhibition of works and archival materials at a German institution in 15 years. From the beginning of her career, EXPORT has been addressing the issues of an increasingly mediatized society and questioning its functions, guiding principles and mechanisms of communication. In 1968, the year when the womens rights movement and student protests substantially challenged the bourgeois society, EXPORT directed peoples gaze onto the female body and the social inscriptions it carries in works such as Tapp und Tastkino or Aktionshose Genitalpanik. But also beyond these now canonical works, EXPORT created a media-reflexive and political oeuvre in the 1980s and 1990s that directs attention to the tension between the individual and society. In the process, the artist simultaneously explored the limits of what can be seen and said, and created connections across media boundaries between seemingly disparate research areas. The work complexes presented at the n.b.k. stem from five decades and illustrate the diversity of subjects in VALIE EXPORTs oeuvre. They range from dealing with societys thinking and acting in dichotomies like culture / nature or masculine / feminine, to locating the human and above all female subject in the worldwithin a (constructed) social body that finds it materialization, among other things, in the built city. How architecture, technologies and media (de)form people is the central focus of research in this process. As a result, archival materials and works from the work complex of research on culture and nature from the 1970s are shown as well as those works that focus on the writing subject that constitutes its