In Memoriam VALIE EXPORT (1940-2026)

It wasn’t all that long ago that I met up with VALIE EXPORT together with Marina Abramović. Although the two hadn’t crossed paths very often in their lives, those encounters had always been pivotal moments. Valie assured me, on that occasion, then that she would attend one of our upcoming Curia gatherings—to risk, so to speak, the view across Vienna from the 18th floor of the building designed by Jean Nouvel, sheltered beneath the ceiling installation by Pipilotti Rist. It would have just possibly been far from her greatest risk.

I no longer remember everything in detail, all the more because the individual events—especially those that reached the public sphere—don’t exactly fade but rather overlap, which makes it difficult to be sure in hindsight whether one experienced them personally or through some medium or other. In any case, Valie as well as her longtime partner Peter Weibel had been familiar presences to me since their earliest artistic works—she as the smoker of the elegant Austrian cigarette brand “Smart EXPORT” and as a particularly daring, uncompromising, and ambitious artist.

In 1967 she abandoned her given name and renamed herself VALIE EXPORT, written in all caps—thereby creating not merely an artist’s name, but an artistic mode of existence. An act of self-empowerment long before that term became a cultural commonplace. And as we know today, even the small artwork that gave rise to this name—the original VALIE EXPORT cigarette pack—is now part of no less a collection than that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Quite honestly: although I believed Valie capable of a lot, perhaps of anything, I hadn’t anticipated her international breakthrough at the time. She could be convincing, threatening, seductive, provocative, and courageous in ways very few women dared to be in public, back then, yet at the same time entertaining, lovable, and charming. She could also be ruthless—including toward herself.

With works such as Tap and Touch Cinema, her early Expanded Cinema actions, and the later Invisible Adversaries, she went beyond merely shifting the boundaries between body, image, public space, and perception to call the very conditions of perception itself into question. Not as a theoretical program, but as direct confrontation. She liberated the female body from its historical role as an object of representation and asserted it as an autonomous medium of artistic and social articulation. In doing so, she became known far beyond this country as one of those voices that do not “illustrate art” but instead alter reality.

She immersed herself in art, lived art, developed and conquered art.

She was not a conceptualist—no, that she wasn’t. She was in many respects a pioneer, a “perceptionist” who knew what she wanted yet also allowed herself to be surprised by what she produced, what she triggered, and what she set into motion. Perhaps that also embodies a subtle distinction in light of how present-day performance art often consists in the expression of a stringent concept. With Valie, there was always danger involved, uncertainty, risk—and precisely therein lay her precision.

As life would have it, it was in the Curia for Art, at the Hofburg and above the rooftops of Vienna, that we encountered each other again after many long years: she a member of the Curia since 2005, I since 1997; she as one of this country’s most internationally influential artists, I as someone who had followed her path over decades with attention, occasional astonishment, and respect.

And so it now falls to me, in the name of the members of the art_curia, to dedicate a moment of remembrance and reflection to an outstanding artist, colleague, and extraordinary personality. To a woman who never conformed, whose desire was never to be decorative but to be necessary. Who altered our gaze—upon art, upon the body, upon the public sphere, and ultimately upon Austria itself.

With VALIE EXPORT’s passing, art loses not only one of its most radical voices but also one of those rare personalities who do not illustrate their era but instead move ahead of it. And what remains of her is perhaps precisely this: not just an oeuvre, not just history, but an attitude. And a notion that art must actually risk something in order to be art.

Peter Noever, Chair, art_curia
Vienna, May 2026