VALIE EXPORT

Born Waltraud Lehner on May 17, 1940, in Linz, Austria, VALIE EXPORT came into the world during a time of upheaval — her father died during World War II, leaving her mother to raise three children alone. Educated in a convent until her early teens, the young Waltraud showed a rebellious spirit from the start, finding the walls of institutional life far too confining. She went on to study at the School for the Arts and Crafts in Linz before moving to Vienna, where she graduated from the National School for Textile Industry in 1964 with a degree in textile design. At eighteen, she married and had a daughter, but the domestic life never fit. "I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother," she would later say. She obtained a divorce, left her daughter temporarily in the care of her sister, and threw herself into the electric artistic scene of Vienna. In 1967, at the age of twenty-seven, she made one of the most decisive gestures of her career: she renamed herself VALIE EXPORT — in capital letters, like a trademark — discarding both her father's surname and her ex-husband's, and proclaiming herself the author of her own identity. Inspired by the Austrian cigarette brand "Smart Export," the name embodied her conviction that she was exporting her own thoughts into the world. From the late 1960s onward, EXPORT became one of Europe's most radical and visionary feminist artists. Her landmark performances — including Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968) and Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) — scandalized Austrian society while reshaping the international conversation about the female body, the male gaze, and the politics of representation. She co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative in 1967/1968 and expanded her practice into expanded cinema, video installation, photography, and film. Her 1977 feature Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and The Practice of Love was nominated for the Golden Bear in 1985. In 1980, EXPORT and fellow artist Maria Lassnig became the first women to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale — a watershed moment for Austrian feminist art. She went on to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of the Arts Berlin, and served as Professor of Multimedia and Performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 1995 to 2005. Her archive became part of her hometown of Linz, and the VALIE EXPORT Center — a dedicated research center for media and performance art — opened there in a former tobacco factory in 2015. Over a six-decade career, she received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, the Max Beckmann Prize, and the Austrian Grand Decoration of Honor with Star. She died in Vienna on May 14, 2026, three days before her eighty-sixth birthday — leaving behind a body of work that permanently changed what art is permitted to say, and who it is permitted to speak for.