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Valie Export Biography

Artist

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“The female body has always been a construction. Even feminist art of the 1970s fashioned a body in accordance with its own ideas, and in this regard it was a form of manipulation too. Subsequently, we've had to engage with a lot of things that we used to disavow as manipulation. We can't just dismiss everything as manipulations anymore, since the alternatives are constructions, too. From our perspective, from this corner of the planet, we have to admit that it's all constructed. There is absolutely no nature. Nature is one of the biggest constructions.”

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“I was trying to develop a completely new, nonvoyeuristic approach to the female body as something other than a visual object. I wanted to find out what happened when you leave behind the voyeuristic mode and confront people with reality. But that's what was so interesting for me to discover: People don't want to see reality. It's a pretty simple idea, really, this question of how we deal with reality. When something is constructed, when it's projected onto a screen, it's acceptable, but it's different when it's there in front of you in a public space.”

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