Valie Export
The Archive as a Place of Artistic Research

The exhibition space in the lower level of Lentos will temporarily become the Valie Export Archive and provide insights into the artist’s thinking, research and development of ideas. In this way she becomes comprehensible as a public person, theorist, and teacher through an abundance of documents, autographs, sketches, and drafts, and also as a private person in letters, poems, photos and notes. In addition, what has been collected and ​“preserved” opens up a view of the artistic network and collective memory of a period of over fifty years.

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.

Valie Export, born 1940 in Linz, is a pioneer of avantgarde and experimental film and one of the most highly regarded media artists internationally.

Curator: Sabine Folie