Provocative performance artist, filmmaker and feminist Valie Export, arguably one of Austria’s best known living artist, died on Thursday in Vienna just three days before her 86th birthday.
Export and Maria Lassnig were the first women to represent Austria at the Venice Biennial in 1980.
“We mourn an outstanding artist, an extraordinary personality, and a remarkable human being,” her foundation said, hailing her as “one of the most influential voices of Europe’s feminist avant-garde”.
Export’s oeuvre spans photography, video, film, installations and sculpture.
Her first artwork in 1966 was a cigarette packet featuring her portrait and her stage name VALIE EXPORT in all caps.
Defying conservative Austria, her works were never intended to “shock” but were rather thought-provoking “acts of protest” against prevailing attitudes in society, Export said.
Society has become “even more restrictive” in present times and she would now be arrested for her public performances, Export told AFP in a 2023 interview ahead of the opening of a photography-focused retrospective in Vienna.
Back in the late 1960s, those who witnessed Export’s bare-breasted “Touch and tap cinema” in several European cities were mainly “curious”, she said.
But Export also had some haters, who sent her poisonous mail, threats and dragged her to court for alleged indecency.
Born Waltraud Lehner and raised by a single mother in postwar Austria, a staunchly Catholic nation struggling to come to terms with its Nazi past, Export’s “performative expression” was shaped by her upbringing.
Educated in a convent school in Linz, Export said she had always been fascinated by the ceremonies and rituals she saw during church service.
Feminism is “far from” where it should be, even though important steps towards equality and the recognition of women have been made, said Export.
The “oppression of women has lasted for centuries, millennia,” so it won’t be possible to bring about social change within “50 or 100 years”, she told AFP in 2023.