curated by Addie Wagenknecht
See all the images from Genitalpanik.
Genitalpanik focuses on the work of Austrian feminist actionist artist Valie Export. Export challenged objectification of the female form by confronting voyeurs with a body that returned their gaze.
What I find most interesting about Export in the context of Austrian culture is that her acts of artistic daring have gone primarily unrecognized in the text and documentation which cover the Austrian Actionist movements especially as her presence in the movement was that of the only women. Austria, in my opinion, is as an extremely patriarchal and traditional country and having a women so boldly challenging social rules at all is extremely fascinating.
Unlike her contemporaries, the Viennese actionists, her work was distinctly feminist in nature—intended to provoke social change and to overturn prevailing attitudes toward women. She used her body as a medium—as a challenge to erotic hypocrisy, as a way of perceiving and codifying information and countering the horrifying political realities of the past. Later she developed a more personal conceptual vocabulary, which, along with the use of technical media, has characterized her oeuvre ever since.
Export’s body of work is simultaneously aggressive and aesthetically refined. Continuing to challenge assumptions and push boundaries, using the latest technology to create space-time discontinuities and convergences, she calls for a new image of “Menschenfrauen” (womankind).
Addie Wagenknecht‘s interests vary from site specific installations, algorithimic art to sustainability and exploring remote regions of the world. Her work prior to Eyebeam focused on computational form and computer vision. Wagenknecht has worked with everyone from Apple Computers to the Surfrider Foundation. Her work as been internationally reviewed and exhibited.
Through her work and as a Fellow at Eyebeam, she hopes to challenge the status quo and create a sense of bittersweet irony (preferably both at once). Addie is also the other-half of studio NOR_/D.
