VALIE EXPORT: Embodied Wednesday, February 28 — Sunday, April 7, 2024 Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, CA 90069 VIsiting Hours: Wednesday — Sunday, 11:00 AM — 6:00 PM Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 28, 2024, 6:00 PM — 8:00 PM In Their Own Image Performance Program: Saturday, March 23, 2024, all day event VALIE EXPORT’s work has redefined the fields of conceptual art, performance, and expanded cinema. Since the 1960s, her early projects have blurred the boundaries between photography and documentation, performance and action, often by utilizing the female body as prop and provocation to classical regimes of architecture. The ‘photo-graphic’ series, Body Configurations (1972-1976) captures direct interventions through bodily insertions into public space. VALIE EXPORT: Embodied presents select works from this seminal series, reflecting her early investigations into the politics of space, image-making, and the body as both an ideological and technological device. Accompanying the photographic series in the exhibition are two video works by VALIE EXPORT, Adjunct Dislocations (1973) and Syntagma (1984), which present the artist’s filmic inquiries into the real and the representational. Working across the mediums of performance, film, photography, video, sculpture and installations, EXPORT’s work engages with the construction and representation of the female body, confronting ideas of sexuality, intimacy, and transgression in both private and public arenas. Her first solo presentation in Los Angeles since 2001, the exhibition centers on EXPORT's early artistic explorations, expanding on the production of meaning and materiality in film, photography, and performance, while challenging the social function of women and the ideologies of space and the built environment. The exhibition positions these influential works in dialogue with a contemporary performance program featuring Los Angeles-based artists responding to VALIE EXPORT’s work and the Schindler House. Artist Biography A pioneer in film, video and installation art, VALIE EXPORT has produced one of the most significant bodies of feminist art in the post-war period. Her groundbreaking films and performances in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a new form of radical, embodied feminism to Europe, examining the politics of the body in relation to its environment, culture and society. The multidisciplinary nature of EXPORT's 'Expanded Cinema' practice and use of her own body as an artistic medium positions her as one of the earliest performance artists alongside Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow. Through her artistic representations of the self, EXPORT questions the (female) body as signifier and bearer of information, challenging viewers by examining the politics of eroticism, the male gaze and liberation. In the Body Configurations she began in 1972, EXPORT uses her own body to visualize the internal accommodations made to nature, architecture and culture. Contorted in response to architectural landmarks or the natural environment, the artist undermines the physical boundaries between self and surroundings. As she explains, 'This analogy between scenic and bodily arrangements, these common forms of revealing mood, have served since the beginning of pictorial art as projection surfaces for expression: external configurations, whether they are in the landscape or in the picture […] serve as the expression of internal states.'