LINZ.- The exhibition curated by Sabine Folie offers initial insights into the extensive material of the Valie Export Archive. Linz acquired the Archive in 2015. The exhibition and a symposium are accompanying the opening of the Valie Export Center in the Tabakfabrik on 10 November.

First Insights into the Valie Export Archiv
The exhibition space in the lower level of LENTOS has temporarily become the Valie Export Archive and provides 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.

An exhibition of the LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz in collaboration with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.).

Valie Export Archive and Valie Export Center Linz
Linz has acquired the Valie Export Archive on the basis of a decision passed by a large majority in Linz’s City Council on 23 April 2015. Work has been carried out intensively since then on cataloging and digitalizing the material.

The living bequest comprises works of art, sketches, drafts, negatives and extensive archival material related to the work of the Linz born artist. The Archive will become part of the holdings of the LENTOS Kunstmuseum and constitutes the most substantial addition since the acquisition of the Gurlitt Collection in the 1950s.

Using the Valie Export Archive as a basis, the City of Linz and its partner institute, the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz, have agreed to operate an international research center, the VALIE EXPORT Center. Forschungszentrum für Medien- und Performancekunst.

The research center aims to create a professional environment of the kind required for the scholarly analysis and appraisal of the VALIE EXPORT Archive, the publication of its contents and its public accessibility.

The Valie Export Center Linz opens its doors in the Tabakfabrik with a festive celebration on 10 November 2017.

Valie Export was born in Linz in 1940 as Waltraud Lehner and attended the school of arts and crafts there. In 1964 she graduated from the higher technical school for the textile industry, HBLVA für Textilindustrie, in Vienna. Since 1967 she has used the name Valie Export as an artistic concept and logo.

For decades, Valie Export has been considered one of the most internationally significant artists from Austria. Her career took off in the late 1960s, when she launched a series of performances in public space that generated extraordinary publicity. Firmly anchored in performance and media art, these performances were marked by a powerful feminist perspective. Her participation in documenta 6 in Kassel (1977) and the Venice Biennale (1980) won official recognition for her work in Austria and it has never been outside the canon of contemporary artistic practice since.

Chairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1989–1992), the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (1991–1995) and the Kunsthochschule für Medien Cologne (1995–2005) gave her a significant role in the arts-centered field of academia.
The award of an honorary doctorate by the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz in 2009 – the first honorary doctorate to be awarded by that university – and the retrospective Zeit und Gegenzeit at the LENTOS Kunstmuseum, put on in collaboration with the Belvedere Wien in autumn 2010, testified to the recognition and appreciation of her oeuvre in her home town. In 2010 she was was awarded the Austrian Republic’s Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria (Großes Goldenes Ehrenzeichen für Verdienste um die Republik Österreich), which was followed by the City of Linz’s own Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold (Großes Goldenes Ehrenzeichen der Stadt Linz) in 2015.