This series of screenprints relates to a performance in which EXPORT reportedly walked into an experimental art-film house in Munich wearing crotchless trousers and a tight leather jacket, with her hair teased wildly, and roamed through the rows of seated spectators, her exposed genitalia level with their faces. Challenging the public to engage with a "real woman" instead of with images on a screen, she illustrated her notion of "expanded cinema," in which the artist's body activates the live context of watching. EXPORT's defiant feminist action was memorialized in a picture taken the following year by the photographer Peter Hassmann in Vienna. EXPORT had the image, in which she holds a machine gun, screenprinted in a large edition and fly-posted it in public squares and on the street.

Gallery label from

From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017.

Collaborating artist Peter Hassmann(photographer)
Medium Screenprints
Dimensions Each 26 3/8 × 19 5/8" (67 × 49.8 cm)
Credit The Modern Women's Fund
Object number 27.2010.a-f
Department Photography

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VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT

Austrian, 1940–2026 76 works online

When VALIE EXPORT (born Waltraud Lehner) was 13 years old, she wrote in her notebook, “In the beginning was the word and the word was a man.

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