VALIE EXPORT at Photographer's Gallery, London Review of the Deutsche Börse Prize exhibition

Deutsche Börse prize review - from crotchless knickers to the sound of a grave

Photographers' Gallery, London
The photographic equivalent of the Turner prize delves into our current state of loss and absence to such a degree that one installation doesn't feature images at all.

By Charlotte Jansen

[...] Viennese performer and pioneering feminist artist Valie Export is nominated for her retrospective The Photographs. As the show is still touring, this display has been curated as a mini-survey of Export's work, from documents of early guerrilla performances such as her Action Pants: Genital Panic, when she paraded around a cinema in Munich in trousers from which a triangle had been removed at the crotch, to her Body Configurations, in which she literally re-inserts her body into patriarchal structures, lying, squeezing and contorting her body into grooves and alcoves of buildings that represent authority and power - a kind of urban version of Ana Mendieta's Earth Body. There are no live colonoscopies here, though Export once had one in front of an audience. With humour, it all makes the point that the patriarchy wasn't designed for women or their bodies.

Export is neither "now" - most of the work here was made in the 1970s - or strictly a photographer. Yet it's easy to see how her influence has been far-reaching, from Marina Abramović (who restaged some of Export's performances), to Carrie Mae Weems' Museum Series and Hito Steyerl's  cyborgian feminism. Photography has been an important witness to her wild and radical interventions over the years. And the photographs - such as the artist extending her branded Valie Export pack of cigarettes towards the camera - are unforgettable.