VALIE EXPORT WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000

VALIE EXPORT, a pioneer of media art, emphasized the need for women to access media in order to make their voices heard and shape the future of media. From today's perspective, the exhibition reflects on past visions of the future, the promise of the 'electronic revolution' (VE) through digitality, and the associated potential for emancipatory spaces.

The extensive archive that is stored at the VALIE EXPORT Center in Linz is the point of departure and material source for the project WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000, and can be interpreted as an exemplary feminist body of work or a herstory of media art.

In her endeavour to conceptualize a “feminine political economy”, VALIE EXPORT has always insisted that the cultural and social status of women and their bodies must be renegotiated in order to form both individual identities and the (medial) future. Correspondingly, EXPORT regarded the promise of the “electronic revolution” effected by digitality as being intimately bound up with the necessity for creating new and emancipatory spaces.

The exhibition’s central film exposé ALASKA (unrealized, 1987) and the intermedial theatre piece Stimmen aus dem Innenraum (Voices from an Inner Space; 1988) strive to establish a new female subjectivity, and stages an encounter between various pioneering women – among them Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who was the first computer programmer, film and porn star Linda Lovelace, the artist Unica Zürn, the mythical author Danielle Sarréra, EXPORT herself, and later the actress and singer Mae West and the writer Mary Shelley – in a virtual space, resisting patriarchal oppression through polyphonic voices and multiple identities. This multiplicity of female voices is evident as well in VALIE EXPORT's curatorial projects, through which she works collaboratively in order to empower female artists and make spaces available to them. The group exhibition MAGNA. Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität (MAGNA. Feminism: Art and Creativity, 1975), for example, conceived by EXPORT, was the first exhibition in Europe to feature female artists exclusively, with an emphasis on the diversity of their medial approaches. WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000 refers to Carolee Schneemann's contribution to MAGNA and envisions a world where young female artists have been freed from all forms of oppression and restrictiveness.

Curated by Anja Casser and Yvonne Fomferra