VALIE EXPORT The Archive as a Place of Artistic Research

10/11/2017 – 28/01/2018
Curator Sabine Folie
LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

The exhibition VALIE EXPORT. The Archive as a Place of Artistic Research provides first insights into the artist's abundant Archive. In this context, an experimental exhibition design with an underlying diagrammatic structure met the challenge of the generally hidden archive's abstract nature, of putting archive holdings on display in a museum context, and of the fact that the diagram constitutes a genuine conceptual visualisation strategy especially for artists of the post-avantgarde. This also pertains to VALIE EXPORT and her numerous artwork-related concepts.

The exhibition VALIE EXPORT. The Archive as a Place of Artistic Research at the lower level of the LENTOS provides first insights into the abundant materials of the VALIE EXPORT Archive, which was acquired by the City of Linz in 2015. Together with the symposium Unruly Archives. Art and its Paper Trails, the exhibition accompanies the opening of the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz at the Tabakfabrik on 10 November 2017.

The exhibition approaches the artist’s extensive archive using an experimental mode of presentation and conveys impressions of the scope of VALIE EXPORT’s artistic research and processes of production based on selected examples. Artists’ archives are increasingly becoming a subject of public and academic interest. They provide information about the path from finding ideas all the way to the detailed formulation of a work and also about the cultural climate of an era. They often even form the central subject of the work.

An exhibition of the LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz in collaboration with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.).