Valie Export (B. 1940)

Executed in 1972, Auflegung and Zu/Stand stem from Valie Export’s landmark photographic series Body Configurations. In these works, the artist contorted her own body into a variety of positions that delineated the spaces and structures formed by urban and natural environments. Within a practice that has sought to liberate the female body from traditional patriarchal narratives, the Body Configurations represent Valie Export’s attempts to undermine the male histories inscribed within the landscape and architecture of her native Austria. By placing her own body in line with these structures – imitating, bisecting and dividing them – she reclaims them for her own feminist agenda. ‘Since 1972, my drawings, photographs, and actions have been concerned with the presentation of postures as the expression of inner states, represented both in nature and in architecture as adaptation, assimilation, imposition, etc. in or on the environment’, she has explained. ‘… At present I am mainly treating female postures from a feminist point of view and dealing with materials from the female environment, in order to thaw the imposed norms of the female bodily gestures, body language, and the associated function of the female body in our culture’ (V. Export, http:/socks-studio.com/2015/0Ω5/adaptation-assimilationimposition-body-confgurations-by-valie-export-1972-76/ [accessed 25 February 2016]).