Hommage à VALIE EXPORT

30/09/2020 – 28/02/2021
Curator Sabine Folie
LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

Today, VALIE EXPORT is internationally considered to be one of the most important exponents of conceptual media, performance and cineastic art. In honour of her 80th birthday, the LENTOS, whose holdings of works by VALIE EXPORT were substantially enlarged in 2015 when the museum purchased the artist’s premature legacy, will present a selection of outstanding works. Chosen with a view to illustrating the many facettes of the artist’s oeuvre, these works, partly from the LENTOS’s own collection, partly on loan from other museums, will be shown in two representative rooms of the museum’s own collection.

The theme of the exhibition focuses on the research into a “history of the body” negotiated in VALIE EXPORT’s work. On the one hand, she examines the body in its connection to technologies, machines and prostheses as a means of dissolving the boundaries of natural physical conditions, and on the other hand, the body within institutional “apparatuses”.

On the basis of artworks ranging from the 1970s to contemporary works, it is possible to trace the relationship between nature and culture and the accompanying culturalisation of the body up into the digital age. The exhibition takes the viewer through the artist’s performative actions and early conceptual photographs. These are placed in relation to “re-enactments” of old masters and to works addressing postcolonial issues in order to establish a link to deliberations on the medial representation of reality, perception and vision as technologically and socially coded.

Works selected by Sabine Folie, Director of the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz

This exhibition is a cooperation between the LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz and the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz.