Since the 1960s, VALIE EXPORT has been creating an extensive archive on her artistic and curatorial projects. In 2015, the artist's archive was acquired by her hometown of Linz and transferred to the collection of the LENTOS Art Museum. Since November 2017, VALIE EXPORT's personal library and extensive current estate have been accessible to researchers and interested parties at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz — in the former tobacco factory planned by Peter Behrens in the 1920s. The trademark VALIE EXPORT, which the artist has used since 1967, derives from the packaging of the cigarette brand SMART EXPORT, which was once produced at the tobacco factory.

The archival holdings document VALIE EXPORT's work as an artist, curator, author, and teacher. The materials include notes, sketches, drawings, typescripts, concepts, correspondence, press clippings, lecture manuscripts, scripts, photographs, slides, videos, models, and ephemera from the international art world. The art-related, contemporary historical, and media theoretical documents are indexed and contextualized by the VALIE EXPORT Center. The continuously expanding online archive provides location-independent access to its holdings and enables research and study.

On site at the VALIE EXPORT Center is the library with several thousand books, catalogs, and international journals. Thematic foci of the holdings are cultural and media theories, film and art studies, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, philosophy, and literature. Computer workstations are available for researchers, on which VALIE EXPORT's films, video works, and essayistic television documentaries can also be viewed.

The VALIE EXPORT Center initiates international and interdisciplinary research on media and performance art. In keeping with VALIE EXPORT's conceptual and analytical approach, the Center encourages engagement with the work processes, theoretical determinations, and critical contemporaneity of contemporary art.

The VALIE EXPORT Center's activities include art education for various target groups, collaborations with colleagues from academia, art, and design, networking with universities, archives, art spaces, and cultural initiatives, as well as public events and publications. VALIE EXPORT's archive provides models for multilayered procedures of arts-based scholarly research. The close connection of extended art practices with new forms of knowledge, social situations, and media-technical processes of transmission is to be opened up in its significance for current fields of action in the arts.

We look forward to inquiries, dialog, and future collaboration!