The Voice as Performance, Act and Body

Man & Woman & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film is a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures... (Joana Kiernan)

Breath Text is a powerfully simple performance in which VALIE EXPORT creates tension by breathing compulsively. “she breathes heavily at the video camera lens while slowly moving her face across it, fogging up the entire space with her lung’s volume. Her piece takes Olson’s breathy poem ‘Gli Amanti’ a step further, not just aiming to capture the particularities of one’s pronunciation in an individual speech act but substituting the specific make her body creates – her ‘breath text,’ the moist gasp on the window glass in front of her – for the signs one would use to write an actual, linguistic ‘love poem.’” – Lisa Siraganian

"The body as carrier of information, in order to convey both spiritual and physical contents, is the reflected image of the internal/psychological and of the external/institutional reality." – VALIE EXPORT “By means of symbolic gestures, a sentence is delivered in sign language, whose wording may only be understood at the end of the performance when the camera pans over a line written on a piece of paper. This is how Sehtext: Fingergedicht defies our concepts of immediate listening and comprehension associated with both hearing and sight. If a literally physical ‘becoming action’ of the verbal is performed, through a language of gestures – in showing by speaking and saying by showing – we can thus identify a dismantling of the hierarchy of the sensory system.” – Sabeth Buchmann

Adjunct Dislocations II documents a technically inventive performance. VALIE EXPORT moves along a track with two closed-circuit cameras that are facing different directions and are focused upon patterned screens. Her action creates changing linear shapes on monitor banks within the space.

“A medical camera films the vaginal area of performer VALIE EXPORT. It penetrates her body. In the same way as in various installations that investigate the origin of the voice through filming of the glottis, the vagina´s interior is made visible here for the purpose of demonstrating what happens inside the body.” – Brigitta Burger-Utzer

The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.

“The Duality of Nature is an experimental video that deals with the 'duality of nature', in other words natural nature and technical nature. Nature is always a construction, whether in dynamic processes, dis-analog systems or physical, technical signals. 'Nature' formulates the organizational forms of representational strategies - symbolic structures, both in reality and in fiction. Where are the borders, the interfaces, the de-bordering and the analogies for ‘natural’ nature and ‘technical’ nature? These considerations provided the basis for the video.” – VALIE EXPORT

“The narrow passage or dangerous passage is a common motif in both funerary and initiation mythologies. I step inside and move through a corridor of electrically charged wires, constantly experiencing painful shocks and sinking to the floor. But I accept the challenge and, in a somewhat pathological increase in willpower, I press my head against the wires again and again. Society is a closed, structured space, which regulates all human energy through painful barriers. Only through an effort of will to overcome the pain (which is at the core of society) is one able to achieve a state of free expression.” – VALIE EXPORT

“In her first film self-portrait, VALIE EXPORT wears an attention-getting curly wig and caresses a woman´s breasts in slow motion, then lasciviously closes and opens her eyes. The carefully applied makeup and wig tell of disguise and acting, and are simultaneously beautiful and terribly stony like the anonymous woman´s head. The brevity and slow speed are reminiscent of Andy Warhol´s Screen Tests, in which every single one of the face´s movements become visible.” – Brigitta Burger-Utzer