Conversations with Women Film Pioneers:
VALIE EXPORT
June 24, 2026
This is a series of talks about the lives and work of women film pioneers from all branches of the industry who have left their mark on Austrian film, but due to the lack of an ongoing canonization need to be discovered again and again. Their conversation partners are filmmakers from the next generation or the generation after.
VALIE EXPORT deposited her film works at the Austrian Film Museum in 2020. At that time, she had a long history with the museum. In 1969, the artist – as a founding member of the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative – took part in a protest against the museum's "authoritarian" structure and programming policy, against its "reactionary historicism." In the time between these two events, and more specifically since 1966, she created an artistic body of work with an existential force. In 1967, she deliberately chose an artist name, which symbolically distances her from the role of 'woman' assigned to her in the art world within a male-dominated society. In her forms of expression – including drawing, conceptual photography, installation work, sculpture, and performance – film and video play a central role. The label 'EXPORT' stands for an art which affectively renders social conditions perceptible and accordingly critiques how the media regulates them. EXPORT's aspiration: to change realities through perception. (Katharina Müller / Translation: Ted Fendt)
VALIE EXPORT in conversation with Julia Pühringer, film critic, curator, and the initiator of our Women Film Pioneers series, along with Katharina Müller, director of the Austrian Film Museum's research and education department and co-editor of the book How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT (Spector Books, 2025).
Following the screening of the film Die Praxis der Liebe (1985), Julia Pühringer and Katharina Müller will talk with VALIE EXPORT.
This is a series of talks about the lives and work of women film pioneers from all branches of the industry who have left their mark on Austrian film, but due to the lack of an ongoing canonization need to be discovered again and again. Their conversation partners are filmmakers from the next generation or the generation after.
VALIE EXPORT deposited her film works at the Austrian Film Museum in 2020. At that time, she had a long history with the museum. In 1969, the artist – as a founding member of the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative – took part in a protest against the museum's "authoritarian" structure and programming policy, against its "reactionary historicism." In the time between these two events, and more specifically since 1966, she created an artistic body of work with an existential force. In 1967, she deliberately chose an artist name, which symbolically distances her from the role of 'woman' assigned to her in the art world within a male-dominated society. In her forms of expression – including drawing, conceptual photography, installation work, sculpture, and performance – film and video play a central role. The label 'EXPORT' stands for an art which affectively renders social conditions perceptible and accordingly critiques how the media regulates them. EXPORT's aspiration: to change realities through perception. (Katharina Müller / Translation: Ted Fendt)
VALIE EXPORT in conversation with Julia Pühringer, film critic, curator, and the initiator of our Women Film Pioneers series, along with Katharina Müller, director of the Austrian Film Museum's research and education department and co-editor of the book How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT (Spector Books, 2025).
Following the screening of the film Die Praxis der Liebe (1985), Julia Pühringer and Katharina Müller will talk with VALIE EXPORT.