VALIE EXPORT is one of the most radical and most significant audiovisual artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This volume focuses on her cinematic work as a universe of options for action, as a visionary springboard for perceiving and reshaping a society riddled with patriarchal structures. The authors of the book have taken up the editors’ invitation to look back at individual works by VALIE EXPORT and reflect on ways to transpose them into the present and on their political potential. Their contributions touch on questions of identity and difference as well as the possibilities of communication and the refusal to communicate; the self-positioning of women*, gender- nonconforming, and disablized people in the fields of art, film, and media and their frames of reference—war, division, fragmentation, objectification, non-belonging. The book is published in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.

Eszter Kondor is project manager for publications at the Austrian Film Museum. Katharina Müller is Head of the Research, Education, and Publications Department of the Austrian Film Museum. Michael Loebenstein is Director of the Austrian Film Museum and member of the Board of Trustees of the VALIE EXPORT Foundation since 2023.