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24/4/2015

Valie Export

Tanja Grunert Gallery, New York

Tanja Grunert Gallery is pleased to present METANOIA a solo installation of 29 video performances by Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT. Composed by EXPORT, the collection includes avant-garde films, structural movies, performance videos, video poems, video body actions and experimental films from 1968–2010. METANOIA represents the artist’s most important work in film and video and demonstrates the wide range of her media oeuvre.

The title of the exhibition comes from the Greek word Metanoia, which has various meanings: meta (=after/post or beyond) + noia, which comes from the Greek nous (=mind) and refers to something post-logical, beyond reason. In modern Greek the word has come to mean “redemption”, which implies a religious meaning. Included in this exhibition will be one of EXPORT’s early performance videos, “Man & Woman & Animal” (1970-73) which looks into the religious and historical construction of gender, its dualisms and ecclesiastical power mechanisms. Noted video works such as “Cuts/Elements of Observation” (1973), “Hyperbulia” (1973) and “Syntagma” (1983) alongside some video poems accentuate EXPORT’S experimental language of video and performance art.

Being a pioneer of conceptual media art, EXPORT's work explores feminist theories and challenges social and political topics. Working across media in body performances, video installations, and expanded cinema, her early guerilla performances have attained an iconic status in feminist art history. She provoked thought about the passive role of women in cinema and confrontation of the private nature of sexuality with the public venues of her performances. METANOIA is an extension of EXPORT’s active engagement with feminism and her desire to experiment in different languages, incorporating body language, structuralism and sexual politics.

VALIE EXPORT is an Austrian-based artist working on video installations, body performances, expanded cinema, computer animations, photography, and sculptures since 1968. Before her political and artistic revolution, Export was a mother and a wife. In 1967, she changed her name to VALIE EXPORT, shedding her father’s and husband’s names and appropriating her new surname from a popular brand of cigarettes. With this gesture of self-determination, EXPORT emphatically asserted her identity within the Viennese art scene, which was then dominated by the taboo-breaking performance art of the Vienna Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Like her male contemporaries, she subjected her body to pain and danger in actions designed to confront the growing complacency and conformism of postwar Austrian culture. But her examination of the ways in which the power relations inherent in media representations inscribe women’s bodies and consciousness distinguishes VALIE EXPORT’s project as unequivocally feminist. Since 1995/1996 she has held a professorship for multimedia performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

VALIE EXPORT has participated in solo and group exhibitions at museums internationally including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Venice Biennale, Venezia; documenta, Kassel; MoCA, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MUMOK, Vienna; Generali Foundation, Vienna; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai;Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles; Tate Modern, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Ars electronica, Linz/Austria. Her works are included in collections such as Centro Pompidou, Paris, Tate Modern, London, Reine Sophia, Madrid, MOMA, New York, MOCA, Los Angeles.

Image: Valie Export METANOIA , 2011 DVD - Edition 29 DVDs of various performances and films

Opening: Friday, April 25, 6-8pm

Tanja Grunert Gallery
33A Orchard Street
Wed - Sun 11am to 6pm

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