How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT

Spector Books, 2025, softcover, 240 pages, 22.7 x 27.6 cm

Reexamining the works and legacy of the acclaimed multimedia feminist artist and their significance for today's world

Austrian artist Valie Export (born 1940) has produced one of the most significant bodies of feminist art in the postwar period, as a pioneer in the fields of photography, video and installation art. Her groundbreaking performances during the 1960s and 1970s introduced a new form of radical, embodied feminism to Europe, examining the politics of the body in relation to its environment, culture and society. This book showcases individual works by Valie Export and reflects on ways to transpose them into the present and pursue their political potential. The contributors touch on questions of identity and difference as well as the possibilities of communication and the refusal to communicate; the self-positioning of women, gender-nonconforming and disabled people in the fields of art, film and media; and the works' frames of reference―war, division, fragmentation, objectification and nonbelonging.