VALIE EXPORT

Body Action, Social Action, Sexual Action, Real Film 1. Street Film 1. Mobile Film 1. True Women’s Film 1. Tap and Touch Film Material: Mini-Movie Theater, Body Screen (naked female chest), people playing along with people (VALIE EXPORT) The TAP- and TOUCH CINEMA is one of VALIE EXPORT’s seminal works, a spectacular feminist action in which she protested against the film apparatus as a materialized, bourgeois ideology. With a simple box, held in front of her naked chest, she went out into the street in several cities and invited people to “visit” the “cinema” for a fifth of a minute. A woman’s body became the screen, the film, which could not be seen but was instead expanded to include another aspect of perception, the sense of “touch.” The first “cinema” of Styrofoam, which the artist made herself, had a little cloth curtain in front of the opening. It was destroyed after the first two actions in Vienna and Munich. The second “cinema” was aluminum with a foam-trimmed opening, made by the designer Wolfgang Ernst. After the exhibition Film as Film (1977- 78, Cologne, Berlin, Essen, Stuttgart, London), it was no longer returned and is considered lost. For the exhibition Out of Actions (Los Angeles, Vienna, Barcelona, Tokyo), EXPORT had Ernst reconstruct the second model. The Generali Foundation acquired this second model and also asked EXPORT to reconstruct her first “cinema.” Like the destroyed original TAP- and TOUCH CINEMA from 1968, the 1999 model was made by the artist herself in the same shape, material, and size. The two objects, in conjunction with photographs, original texts, reports, and a video, testify to her historic action. (Sabine Breitwieser)