Curations
![[VEC.005.006] - KUNST MIT EIGEN-SINN. International exhibition of contemporary art by women in t](/media/protected/images/_VEC.00.2e16d0ba.fill-487x678.format-jpeg.jpegquality-60.jpg)
The Artist as Curator
VALIE EXPORT’s collaborative curatorial projects have focused on raising the visibility of female artists from all fields. Two examples are MAGNA. Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität. Ein Überblick über die weibliche Sensibilität, Imagination, Projektion und Problematik, suggeriert durch ein Tableau von Bildern, Objekten, Fotos, Vorträgen, Diskussionen, Lesungen, Filmen, Videobändern und Aktionen, zusammengestellt von VALIE EXPORT, 1975 [MAGNA. Feminism: Art and Creativity. A Survey of Female Sensibility, Imagination, Projection, and Problematics, as evoked by a tableau of images, objects, photographs, lectures, discussions, readings, films, videotapes, and actions that was assembled by VALIE EXPORT] in 1975, and Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn. Aktuelle Kunst von Frauen [Art with a Sense of Its Own Self-will: Contemporary Art by Women], initiated by VALIE EXPORT in 1985 and realized together with cocurator Silvia Eiblmayr at the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna (now renamed Belvedere 21). Both exhibitions continue to constitute milestones in the history of women in art and society.
![[VEC.004.484] - Das Reale und sein Double: Der Körper](/media/protected/images/_VEC.00.2e16d0ba.fill-487x339.format-jpeg.jpegquality-60_2bcyy9i.jpg)
Virtual Bodies
Based on her large collection of material on the history of the body, in the 1990s VALIE EXPORT developed an essayistic script for a documentary film that encompassed the history of culture, art, and science, artificial intelligence, the dimensions of the virtual, and with forays into the fictional and the literary. In the draft script, these building blocks were interwoven with VALIE EXPORT’s own works, for her engagement with body rituals and inscriptions in the body in a world that is increasingly technicized and virtualized has been the subject of VALIE EXPORT’s artistic work ever since the 1960s. It was intended to realize this work titled Der virtuelle Körper. Vom Prothesenkörper zum postbiologischen Körper [The Virtual Body: From the Prosthetic Body to the Postbiological Body] in Austrian Television’s series ORF Kunststücke; however, despite years of preliminary work it was never made due to budget constraints. This script, which has been thoroughly reworked and edited, is now available: a project that the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz realized in collaboration with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein NBK and VALIE EXPORT.
![[VEC.000.001.K] - Bewegte Bilder über sich bewegende Personen](/media/protected/images/_VEC.00.2e16d0ba.fill-487x339.format-jpeg.jpegquality-60_pPRO84H.jpg)
Expanded Cinema
VALIE EXPORT has been developing Expanded Cinema actions since 1968 which rely equally on an active screen and an active audience, and open up the field of vision through technical resources in such a way that both cinema and the medium itself as an independent entity are dissolved. “Expanded Cinema, the expanded film, was also about using the medium to represent and break up power structures, as they said back then: to decode, to deconstruct.” VALIE EXPORT, “Austria im Rosennetz”, Der Standard, 18.10.1996. The Expanded Cinema 1 showcase assembles materials about cinematic, actionist, and technological reflections on the expanded concept of the screen and provides insights on this artistic field.
![[VEC.004.612] - Voice & Void - Vorträge](/media/protected/images/_VEC.00.2e16d0ba.fill-487x678.format-jpeg.jpegquality-60_nJUjTW5.jpg)
The Voice as a Medium
The voice as a medium, as a carrier of information, and as a political issue has been explored by VALIE EXPORT since the 1960s and has been translated into various formats defined by the artist: as a multi-channel video installation, as a body communication action and extended film, as a performance, and also as an intermedia theater play. This selection of sketches, notes, and catalog contributions documents a period of approximately 40 years. Content-wise it is about the power of the voice, used and abused by people in influential (political) positions. Not least, however, it is also about the self-empowerment of women who raise their voices to make their concerns and demands heard and who exercise self-determination.