Biography of Valie Export

VALIE EXPORT (born Waltraud Lehner on 17 May 1940 in Linz; died 14 May 2026 in Vienna) was an Austrian media, performance and film artist. From the late 1960s onward she worked with body, language, camera, public space and new media, changing feminist art in Europe.

Name and self-authorship

In 1967 she left behind the names Waltraud Lehner and Hollinger and called herself VALIE EXPORT, written in capital letters. The new name was not a decorative artist's name, but a concept: a self-authored identity defined neither through father nor husband. Its reference to a cigarette brand also turned it into a logo, a sign and an early work of mediated self-production.

Expanded cinema and performance

EXPORT worked around Vienna's avant-garde film scene and answered it with a distinctly feminist media practice. In actions such as TAPP und TASTKINO and Action Pants: Genital Panic, she shifted the relationship between image, body and audience. Her works asked who looks, who is shown and how the female body is made available in film, advertising and everyday life. Their force lay in control over gaze, language and representation.

Film, video and public spaces

Her work includes actions, photographs, experimental films, videos, installations, sculptures, texts and curatorial projects. EXPORT was among the co-founders of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative in 1968. For her, film was more than an event on a screen: a system made of technology, body, perception and power. Later works in public space connected signs, architecture and movement.

Teaching, exhibitions and recognition

EXPORT participated in major international exhibitions, including documenta and the Venice Biennale. In 1980 Maria Lassnig and VALIE EXPORT became the first women artists to represent Austria in the Austrian Pavilion at the Biennale. She taught in the United States, in Berlin and until 2005 at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In 2019 she received the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, in 2022 the Max Beckmann Prize, as well as high Austrian honors.

Archive and afterlife

With the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz, her estate became a research site for media and performance art. This fits a body of work that always considered document, trace, repetition and analysis. EXPORT did not leave behind a closed style brand, but an open field of work: body as medium, image as a form of power, language as material and art as intervention in social order.

Farewell in Vienna

VALIE EXPORT died in Vienna on 14 May 2026, three days before her 86th birthday. Her work remains connected with an art that did not ask permission, but developed its own forms of seeing, speaking and acting.