Mladen Dolar and VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT, "the voice as performance, act and body", performance, 2007, Courtesy of Charim Galerie, Vienna

Tuesday, 30.6. 2009, at 6 p.m.
Auditorium of the City Museum, Gosposka 15, Ljubljana

You are kindly invited to the presentation of VALIE EXPORT's work the voice as performance, act and body and her conversation with the Slovene philosopher Mladen Dolar on Tuesday, 30 June, at 6 p.m., in the auditorium of the City Museum, Ljubljana.

VALIE EXPORT has been a key figure in contemporary art since the 1960s; she played a vital pioneering role in the development of performance and feminist activist strategies as well as conceptual photography and film. Her artistic work includes video environments, digital photography, installation, body performances, feature films, experimental films, documentaries, expanded cinema, conceptual photography, body-material interactions, persona performances, laser installations, objects, sculptures and texts on contemporary art history and feminism. Her works may be found in such international collections as those of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Queen Sophia Museum, Madrid; MoMA, New York; and MoCA, Los Angeles. Since 1968, in addition to her numerous solo exhibitions, she has participated in many of the most important international group shows, such as the Venice Biennial, Documenta, Ars Electronica in Linz, and the London and Berlin international film festivals.
During her artistic career VALIE EXPORT has also been active as a writer and curator. Together with Silvia Eiblmayr, she is curating the Austrian Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennial.

The conversation with Mladen Dolar will be based on VALIE EXPORT's performance the voice as performance, act and body, which was included in Robert Storr's selection for the 2007 Venice Biennial (in the Arsenale).

The film I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head engages with the origin of the voice.
"The glottis, the vocal cords, are symbols of the voice / they divide two phenomena / the voice inside, the breath / and the voice outside / the phenomenon of vocalization / of speech formation" (from the spoken text in VALIE EXPORT's performance).

Mladen Dolar taught for twenty years in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he now is a senior research fellow. He is a specialist in the areas of German idealism, French structuralism and psychoanalysis, and has made an ample contribution to the philosophy of music, literature and art. He has presented lectures at numerous foreign universities, especially in the USA. In addition to numerous papers published in Slovene and foreign theory journals, he has published eight books in Slovene, the most recent being On Avarice (2002), On Voice (2003) and Prosopopoia (2006). His most important books in foreign languages are A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006, appearing in several translations as well), Wenn die Musik der Liebe Nahrung ist (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2001) and, with Slavoj Žižek, Opera's Second Death (London: Routledge, 2002).

The encounter with VALIE EXPORT represents a very productive intersection of two approaches to the problem of the voice, with theoretical reflection immediately overlapping artistic practice.