VALIE EXPORT, Austrian Performance Artist Who Reframed the Politics of the Female Body, Dies Aged 85

VALIE EXPORT, the Austrian performance artist, filmmaker and theorist whose confrontational works helped redefine feminist art in postwar Europe, has died aged 85.

Her foundation announced on Thursday 14 May that she had died earlier the same day in Vienna, three days before her 86th birthday.

Working across performance, photography, film, video and installation, EXPORT emerged during the late 1960s as one of the few women associated with the male-dominated Viennese Actionist movement. While many Actionist works foregrounded violence, ritual and bodily extremity, EXPORT used her own body to examine structures of gender, spectatorship and social control.

In a statement announcing her death, her gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac described EXPORT as “one of the most visionary feminist artists to emerge in Europe in the second half of the 20th century”.

VALIE EXPORT. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

She became internationally known through performances that challenged conventional representations of women in cinema, advertising and public life. Her best-known work, Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968), involved the artist wearing a curtained box over her bare chest while inviting passersby in Vienna and other European cities to place their hands inside and touch her breasts. The work reversed the logic of cinematic spectatorship by replacing passive viewing with direct physical encounter, forcing participants to confront their own role in the objectification of women.

Another early work, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969), further cemented her reputation. Wearing crotchless trousers, EXPORT entered a Munich cinema and walked among seated audience members, confronting them with the presence of a real female body rather than an image projected onscreen. A photograph of the artist holding a machine gun while wearing the same trousers later became one of the most widely reproduced images in feminist art history.

Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz in 1940, EXPORT grew up in wartime and postwar Austria. Her father died during the Second World War, leading her to attend a convent school. At 14, she left to study at Linz’s School of Arts and Crafts. She married young and had a daughter before the age of 20, but later divorced and moved to Vienna to continue her studies.

In interviews later in life, EXPORT described marriage and conservative postwar Austrian society as formative pressures on her artistic development. In 1967, she adopted the name VALIE EXPORT, styling it in capital letters. The surname referenced the Austrian cigarette brand Smart Export, while also rejecting both her father’s and former husband’s surnames. The gesture became central to her broader critique of patriarchal social structures.

In 1968, EXPORT cofounded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative alongside artists and experimental filmmakers including Peter Weibel, Kurt Kren and Hans Scheugl. Her practice increasingly developed around what she described as ‘expanded cinema’, disinterested in distinctions between film, performance and public space.

Works from the 1970s expanded beyond direct bodily confrontation into investigations of architecture, surveillance and media culture. Her photographic series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations, 1972–82) positioned her body against urban environments, using posture and physical tension to examine how city cultures regulate behaviour. In Facing a Family (1971), a television broadcast showing a family silently watching television turned spectatorship back onto the viewer.

EXPORT also developed a substantial career in experimental and narrative film. Her feature film The Practice of Love (1985), centred on a journalist investigating peep shows in Hamburg’s red-light district, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Though much of her early work initially provoked scandal in Austria and Germany, institutional recognition increased significantly from the 1990s onwards. In 1980, EXPORT and Maria Lassnig became the first women to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale. EXPORT’s presentation included Geburtenbett (Birth Bed), an installation featuring an oversized female abdomen on a mattress illuminated by red neon lighting and combined with televised religious imagery.

VALIE EXPORT, Tapp- und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), 1968, black and white photograph, in frame 69 × 76cm ©VALIE EXPORT / SIAE 2025. Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac London, Paris, Salzburg, Milan, Seoul

Her work later entered major museum collections internationally, including those of Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and Museo Reina Sofía. She participated in multiple editions of documenta, including in 1977 and 2007.

A broader reassessment of her influence followed in the 2000s, particularly as younger generations of performance artists revisited her work. In 2005, Marina Abramović reenacted Action Pants: Genital Panic as part of Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

EXPORT also held several academic positions during her career, teaching at institutions including the University of Wisconsin, the San Francisco Art Institute and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, where she served as professor of multimedia and performance from 1995–2005.

In 2017, the VALIE EXPORT Center opened in Linz as a research centre and archive dedicated to media and performance art. The archive contains artworks, correspondence, sketches, film materials and manuscripts accumulated over more than five decades.

Major retrospectives in recent years included exhibitions at the Albertina in Vienna in 2023 and C/O Berlin in 2024. In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

Her work remains central to histories of feminist art, performance and experimental cinema, particularly for the ways it challenged assumptions about who controls images of the body and under what conditions those images are consumed.