Tribute 2020: VALIE EXPORT

 
17.12.2019 //

This year, CROSSING EUROPE will dedicate its Tribute section to one of the most important representatives of international media, film, and performance art: VALIE EXPORT. She was born in Linz in 1940, where she also grew up. On the occasion of her 80th birthday, and on the initiative of the VALIE EXPORT Centre Linz in cooperation with CROSSING EUROPE and sixpackfilm, a comprehensive program of VALIE EXPORT’s films and videos will be shown for the first time in her place of birth at this year’s edition of CROSSING EUROPE.
 
The tribute presents a selection of short and feature-length films from over forty years of being active as an artist. This includes experimental studies, world-famous performance works, feminist media critiques, and Expanded Cinema actions, ranging from 8mm film to large scale image formats, the first video systems to medical image investigations: conceptualized for the cinema hall, the exhibition space, or the television. In the framework of the festival the following feature-length and experimental films will be shown on the silver screen, in attendance of VALIE EXPORT, who will also give a Tribute-Talk.
 
| Feature length films |
 

  • Unsichtbare Gegner/ Invisible Adversaries (AT 1976)
  • Menschenfrauen / Human Females (AT 1979)
  • Die Praxis der Liebe / The Practice of Love (AT/DE 1984) – Opening Film  Crossing Europe 2020
  • Das Bewaffnete Auge - VALIE EXPORT im Dialog mit der Filmavantgarde (D: Zoltan Pataky; AT 1984)


| Short films |
 

  • Gedichte / Poems (AT 1966 – 1980)
  • Selbstportrait mit Kopf / Self-Portrait with Head (AT 1966/67)
  • TAPP und TASTKINO / TAP and TOUCH CINEMA (AT 1968)
  • Body Tape (AT 1970)
  • Hauchtext: Liebesgedicht / Breath Text: Love Poem (AT 1970 – 73)
  • Facing a Family (AT 1971)
  • ...Remote…Remote… (AT 1973)
  • Adjungierte Dislokationen / Adjunct Dislocations (AT 1973)
  • Asemie – die Unfähigkeit, sich durch Mienenspiel ausdrücken zu können / Asemie or the Inability to Express Oneself through Facial Expressions (AT 1973)
  • Hyperbulie (AT 1973)
  • Mann & Frau & Animal / Man & Woman & Animal (AT 1970-73)
  • Sehtext: Fingergedicht / Visual Text: Finger Poem (AT 1973)
  • Body Politics (AT 1974)
  • Syntagma (AT 1983)
  • Ein perfektes Paar oder die Unzucht wechselt ihre Haut / Lust (AT 1986)
  • the voice as performance, act and body    (AT 2007)
  • i turn over the pictures of my voice in my head (AT 2009)


INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES (festival premiere at the Berlinale Forum 1977) was VALIE EXPORT’s first feature-length film and integrates various different artistic disciplines into the plot. Photography, performance, and video art fuse with the story of a woman who feels increasingly threatened by an invisible force. MENSCHENFRAUEN (world premiere Berlinale Forum 1980) outlines the social relativity of women on the basis of four female protagonists who are all in relationships with men, and their attempts to break free from their relationships and the roles that are ascribed to them by society. In the film THE PRACTICE OF LOVE (world premiere Berlinale Competition 1985), the artist transports her aesthetics from video art into a thriller, centered around sexual dependence and political corruption.
 
VALIE EXPORT (*1940 in Linz) is world-wide pioneer in media, performance, and film art. She has been active ever since the 1960s, and her works mostly concern the relationship between body and space in a physical, social, and technological form. After facing great hostilities, VALIE EXPORT now stands one of the most relevant and internationally successful artists who combine multi-media art practices and theories with feminist causes. She chose her artist name already in 1967, in order to symbolically distance herself from her assigned role as a female artist within a society dominated by men. She made waves in the 1960s and 1970s with body actions in the public space, among others with TAPP and TASTKINO. Her forms of expression range from drawings and conceptual photography, to installations and sculpture, to performance art. Motion picture always plays a big role in her works, both as film and video. The image and the conditions of its representation in the media have been her main topic since the very beginning. Her interest in structure, technology, and the impact of motion pictures stands opposite to her dealing with the body as a part of an existence split between reality and representation.
 
The co-founder of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative (1968) has taken part in multiple film and video festivals all over the world. Next to her activity as an internationally exhibiting artist, her participation at the Biennale in Venice (1980) and the documenta (1977, 2007), VALIE EXPORT also works as a curator. She teaches at institutions such as the Art Institute in San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee/USA, and the Hochschule der Künste Berlin. Until 2005 VALIE EXPORT held a professorship for multimedia performance at the art university for media in Cologne. In 2009 she was the co-commissioner of the Austrian pavilion at the Biennale in Venice.
 
VALIE EXPORT was awarded the best-endowed European art award, the Roswitha Haftmann prize for her oeuvre of pioneering feminist and media-reflexive works in 2019.
 
| The TRIBUTE 2020 is carried out in collaboration with the VALIE EXPORT CENTER LINZ and sixpackfilm. |