VALIE EXPORT and Ketty La Rocca BODY SIGN envisions a meeting between two leading figures of European art

By MUSE Team

This is not merely a two-person exhibition. It is more accurate, in fact, to speak of an intense conversation made of gestures, postures, hands, glances, marks etched into the skin, and words that refuse to stay still on the page. Export and La Rocca never met; they worked in different contexts, Vienna and Florence, yet their works seem to respond to each other as if born from the same profound necessity: to reclaim the female body from systems of control and restore to it an autonomous strength. In the 1960s and 1970s, both understood that the dominant language was far from neutral. It was already a claimed territory, structured according to rules that determined who could speak and how. From this realization arose their radical choice to seek elsewhere: in the body, in gesture, in touch, in the living matter of experience. Photography, video, performance, writing, sculpture, all became interchangeable tools, porous surfaces through which a thought could pass that no longer wished to be tamed.

The exhibition takes its title from a series by Export in which the sign literally becomes body, and the body becomes sign. Yet this continuous exchange runs throughout the work of both artists. La Rocca makes it explicit with striking force when she brings letters, punctuation, and alphabets off the page, transforming them into objects, physical presences that are at once unsettling and familiar. Body Sign is neither a celebratory show nor an exercise in historical reconstruction. It is an experience that speaks to the present, because the questions Export and La Rocca posed remain open: who has the right to speak? In what language? And what happens when the body refuses to be merely an object to be looked at, becoming instead an active subject of meaning?