VALIE EXPORT Starre Identität, 1972

In 1972 EXPORT began her most significant series of early photographic experiments: the Body Configurations, in which she uses her own body to visualise the internal accommodations made in response to nature, architecture and culture. For these works, EXPORT positions herself in the urban landscape, her body curved to conform to the shape of the world around her. In Starre Identität (1972), the artist clings to a bollard, in defiance of the conformist culture of her native Austria in the post-war period. Her ultimate failure to conform to the public space, the geometric lines applied to the photograph, and the uneasy gymnastics of her figure emphasise the tension between the individual and the ideological and social forces that shape urban reality, registering the psychological effects of the built and natural environments on their inhabitants.