In memory of VALIE EXPORT (1940–2026)​​​​​​​

VALIE EXPORT died on May 14, 2026, just before her 86th birthday—the artist with a name in uppercase letters, which she had given herself in 1967, and which annoyed some of her colleagues, as a name in capitals is more quickly noticed and catchier in a list of multiple exhibiting artists.

EX-PORT: out of the port. She said it was right to take your own name, not to carry the name of your (own) husband or your (own) father; to give yourself a name that may possibly also provide a meaning, embody a term or a calling. VALIE EXPORT thus lead her thoughts out of herself, out of the port of her own world out into the (wide) world. Like a packet of cigarettes that circulates, and from which individuals take one (cigarette) from time to time.

MADE IN AUSTRIA. She was born in Linz. VALIE EXPORT referred explicitly to Austria as her cultural context, the aesthetic and intellectual tradition she interacted with as a child. Despite her experiences abroad, the exchanges with and participation in international discourses and the adoption of concepts from the Anglo-Saxon cultural space, despite the fundamental strategy of a break with any idea of traditionalism, despite her transnationally oriented feminist standpoint, she often stressed her having-being-made-of-something. She was so much in language that despite the translations, the actions, the visualisations, and the technical transfers, at the core, her works speak a German language.

Her fascination with language corresponds to her fundamental strategy of looking for the origin—of phenomena, tendencies, preferences, associations, and therefore the relationships to phenomena. For years, through sketches and works, VALIE EXPORT followed her desire to see the origin of (her) language, precisely there, where the body (her glottis) speaks. For the installation Der Schmerz der Utopie (The Pain of Utopia), which was part of the 52nd Venice Biennale, VALIE EXPORT had a laryngoscope inserted through her nose and into her throat, in order to show recordings of her glottis while it spoke a text. The origin of the (her) voice: one of the places in which VALIE EXPORT negotiates an identity with herself that she can (finally) accept. Because, as she herself recognised, non-identity never exists, as it derives from the idea of identity.

VALIE EXPORT loved to teach. From the 1980s she taught in Linz, Munich, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Vienna and Berlin, until she came to the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) in 1995 to take a position as professor of multimedia and performance. “The tear in the image – the rift in perception” was the title of her inaugural lecture. Her position: Media is there in order to explore and reflect (self-) perception. Images and devices are available (to the self) in order to recognise yourself through difference. In VALIE EXPORT’s image theory and practice, there are (only) fractures: forms that experience the body as cumbersome or alien, often “antagonistic”—“her” body, the body of a woman. Her hands hold plates of glass with holes shot through them, she has her stomach cut as a dangling loaf of bread, she cuts open her cuticle with a blade, she lays out her body on steps and other architectural objects. She comes from the praxis of cinematic and knows the materiality of film and film apparatus, she wears cameras on her body, cut screens out, realises numerous sketches of transmedia and intermedia translation. Her “material” is/becomes subservient to a language of definitions and definitional operations.

VALIE EXPORT pursued themes of multimedia staging at the KHM; in her colloquium the ideas of an expansion of media, of feedback and the hybridisation of reality through virtuality played a large role. VALIE EXPORT really valued how praxis-based the young academy was and dedicated many seminars to the promotion and discussion of free and experimental work. Self-reflexion of artistic work and of one’s own work ideas is the task she assigned to the students. She called for presence in the atelier and openness to techniques and technology. With her seminars, VALIE EXPORT also supported the idea of an equality as well as a “togetherness” of arts and sciences. In collaboration with colleagues from the area of media sciences, VALIE EXPORT put together seminars on memory and recollection, bio/gene/anthropological technologies, labyrinths, code art. VALIE EXPORT ended her work at the KHM in 2005 with the curation of the media art exhibitions expanded arts and expanded arts II.

The institutionalisation of her position as an international artist and recognised pioneer in various discourses over the last 20 years of her work is clear to see in the numerous international exhibitions and retrospectives, publications and prizes. In 2015, the City of Linz acquired VALIE EXPORT’s archive, which was then transferred to the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz in 2017. The VALIE EXPORT Center is a collaboration between the City of Linz, the LENTOS art museum and the Linz University of Arts. As an internationally oriented research centre, it fosters the artistic and scientific examination of media and performance art and embodies in its particular set of tools the methodological vision of a filmmaker and artist who liked writing texts and could generate countless references in the search for the source of every thought—from within herself, out of that self that only rediscovers itself in the seam, the suture.

SEMPER ET UBIQUE – ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE. Her thoughts remain (in “this” world).

Susanna Schoenberg