Valie Export
Valie Export (often written as 'VALIE EXPORT') (born May 17, 1940 in Linz as Waltraud Lehner, later Waltraud Höllinger) is an Austrian artist. Her artistic work includes video installations, body performances, expanded cinema, computer animations, photography, sculptures and publications covering contemporary arts.
Biography
Educated in a convent until the age of 14, Export studied painting, drawing, and design at the National School for Textile Industry in Vienna, and briefly worked in the film industry as a script girl, editor, and extra. Austrian feminism was forced to address the fact that by the 1970s there was still a generation of Austrians whose attitudes towards women were based on Nazi ideology. They also had to confront the guilt of their parents’ (mothers’) complacency within the Nazi regime. Export herself, before her political and artistic revolution, was a mother and a wife. In 1967, she changed her name to VALIE EXPORT (written in uppercase letters, like an artistic logo, shedding her father’s and husband’s names and appropriating her new surname from a popular brand of cigarettes). In conversation with Gary Indiana for BOMB magazine, Export described her name-change:
