News
Thu, 14. May 2026
VALIE EXPORT, 1940 – 2026
The Austrian Film Museum mourns the loss of VALIE EXPORT. The artist, who was also an Honorary Member of the Film Museum passed away today, May 14, 2026, in Vienna.
I am deeply saddened – as is the entire team at the Film Museum.
VALIE EXPORT was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word: she broke new ground where none existed before her. From 1965 onwards, she created a resolutely feminist body of work of existential impact – in film, video, performance, photography, and installation art – which did not bow to the pressure of overly simplistic identity politics, but sought to do more: to break down society's binary code and shift gender ideologies. She chose her artist's name in 1967 as a statement of intent: a symbolic distancing from the role assigned to her in a male-dominated art world. Her aim was fundamental: to change realities through perception. For VALIE EXPORT, cinema was not a place of consumption. For her, "cinema" did not take place solely in the screening room; she also took to the streets, thereby anticipating forms of activist engagement with public space and its commodification that we now take for granted.
For her, "film" extended into other media: into television, Expanded Cinema, into performance, the gallery space, into the interior of her own body, into the digital realm. "Some of my performances may look very painful, but they are not. What is painful is the thought of how I live, how we all have to live in our society", said VALIE EXPORT. Her militant gesture of arming the senses, her consistently critical of representation, often shrewd affront as an invitation to understand the world: instructions in civil disobedience, for generations.
VALIE's connection to the Film Museum dates back to the institution's founding years. In 1969, as a member of the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative, she took part in a protest action against the institution's structure and programming policy, which were perceived as authoritarian. Yet as early as the 1980s, EXPORT entrusted the Film Museum with original materials from her film work. Despite all the friction and across the decades, she understood the Film Museum for what it aspires to be: a school of seeing, a place of research, mediation and engagement.
In 2020, she donated her film oeuvre to us. When we dedicated a retrospective to her in 2021 to mark this donation, the cinema was full of young, curious and enthusiastic faces. What we saw (again) back then moved us deeply: the rawness of this work, its many tonalities, its emotional force – and its relevance today. Last year, to mark her 85th birthday, we honoured her with a celebration in collaboration with Belvedere 21 and sixpackfilm.
With the volume How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT – edited by Katharina Müller, Eszter Kondor, and myself – published at the same time, we sought to make her work comprehensible as a universe of possible courses of action: as a visionary blueprint for perceiving and reshaping a society permeated by patriarchal structures. A workshop discussion with VALIE EXPORT as a "film pioneer" was planned for June 2026, focusing on her work as a director, writer, and producer. This will no longer take place. We will dedicate this evening to her memory.
What remains: a body of work that challenges and calls upon us – to physical self-determination, to subversive appropriation. An incitement to collective defiance. It struck like a bolt of lightning into reactionary post-war Austria – and resonates with a present that needs such storms more than ever. We will do our part by preserving, and showing VALIE EXPORT's work.
Michael Loebenstein, on behalf of the team at the Austrian Film Museum
I am deeply saddened – as is the entire team at the Film Museum.
VALIE EXPORT was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word: she broke new ground where none existed before her. From 1965 onwards, she created a resolutely feminist body of work of existential impact – in film, video, performance, photography, and installation art – which did not bow to the pressure of overly simplistic identity politics, but sought to do more: to break down society's binary code and shift gender ideologies. She chose her artist's name in 1967 as a statement of intent: a symbolic distancing from the role assigned to her in a male-dominated art world. Her aim was fundamental: to change realities through perception. For VALIE EXPORT, cinema was not a place of consumption. For her, "cinema" did not take place solely in the screening room; she also took to the streets, thereby anticipating forms of activist engagement with public space and its commodification that we now take for granted.
For her, "film" extended into other media: into television, Expanded Cinema, into performance, the gallery space, into the interior of her own body, into the digital realm. "Some of my performances may look very painful, but they are not. What is painful is the thought of how I live, how we all have to live in our society", said VALIE EXPORT. Her militant gesture of arming the senses, her consistently critical of representation, often shrewd affront as an invitation to understand the world: instructions in civil disobedience, for generations.
VALIE's connection to the Film Museum dates back to the institution's founding years. In 1969, as a member of the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative, she took part in a protest action against the institution's structure and programming policy, which were perceived as authoritarian. Yet as early as the 1980s, EXPORT entrusted the Film Museum with original materials from her film work. Despite all the friction and across the decades, she understood the Film Museum for what it aspires to be: a school of seeing, a place of research, mediation and engagement.
In 2020, she donated her film oeuvre to us. When we dedicated a retrospective to her in 2021 to mark this donation, the cinema was full of young, curious and enthusiastic faces. What we saw (again) back then moved us deeply: the rawness of this work, its many tonalities, its emotional force – and its relevance today. Last year, to mark her 85th birthday, we honoured her with a celebration in collaboration with Belvedere 21 and sixpackfilm.
With the volume How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT – edited by Katharina Müller, Eszter Kondor, and myself – published at the same time, we sought to make her work comprehensible as a universe of possible courses of action: as a visionary blueprint for perceiving and reshaping a society permeated by patriarchal structures. A workshop discussion with VALIE EXPORT as a "film pioneer" was planned for June 2026, focusing on her work as a director, writer, and producer. This will no longer take place. We will dedicate this evening to her memory.
What remains: a body of work that challenges and calls upon us – to physical self-determination, to subversive appropriation. An incitement to collective defiance. It struck like a bolt of lightning into reactionary post-war Austria – and resonates with a present that needs such storms more than ever. We will do our part by preserving, and showing VALIE EXPORT's work.
Michael Loebenstein, on behalf of the team at the Austrian Film Museum
