Tributes from artists, musicians and curators following the death of Valie Export have highlighted her lasting influence on feminist art, performance practice and the political use of the body in public space.

Export, whose confrontational performances and photographic works helped redefine feminist avant-garde art in Europe from the late 1960s onward, was remembered this week by figures across contemporary art, music and theatre.

Many cited her willingness to challenge conventions surrounding nudity, spectatorship and gendered power structures.Canadian musician Peaches described one of Export’s most recognisable images — showing the artist in crotchless trousers holding a gun as permanently fixed in her memory.

Peaches said the photograph represented a fearless artistic gesture that continued to resonate decades after it was created.She also compared Export’s 1968 performance Tapp-und-Tastkino to Cut Piece by Yoko Ono. In the performance, Export wore a box resembling a miniature cinema over her bare chest and invited members of the public to place their hands inside through curtained openings.

Peaches said the work forced audiences to confront their own role in systems of looking, touch and power.Austrian choreographer and theatre director Florentina Holzinger said Export’s 1969 performance Genital Panic remained politically relevant in a digital era shaped by social media imagery and debates over bodily autonomy.

In the work, Export entered an experimental cinema in Munich wearing crotchless jeans and moved among seated audience members, confronting viewers directly with her exposed body. Holzinger said the performance challenged assumptions about how women’s bodies are viewed and regulated in public space.

She argued that Export’s work remained urgent amid contemporary political disputes surrounding gender, sexuality and censorship.“The female body is not a polite object,” Holzinger wrote in tribute. She described Export’s practice as a form of resistance directed against structures of social control and patriarchal power.

American artist Joan Jonas described Export as “bold, radical, innovative” and said her body-centred performances fundamentally altered how artists engaged with architecture, spectatorship and public confrontation.Jonas highlighted several key works from Export’s career, including Tapp-und-Tastkino, Genital Panic and Encirclement.

She also referenced Export’s reflections on Homo Meter II, in which the artist carried bread attached to her body in public spaces. Export described the work as an extension of the body and said audiences often reacted with uncertainty or discomfort.Jonas noted that Export frequently described the isolation involved in confronting audiences directly in public environments during the early years of feminist performance art.

South African artist Candice Breitz said Export demonstrated that artists did not need to conform to systems they opposed. Breitz characterised Export as a “feminist provocateur” whose work reclaimed public and institutional space historically dominated by men.

Breitz referred to a 1968 intervention in which Export led Austrian artist and curator Peter Weibel through the streets of Vienna on a leash. The performance has frequently been interpreted as a symbolic inversion of patriarchal authority and gender hierarchy within the European art world of the period.

Curator Shoair Mavlian emphasised Export’s importance to feminist photography and media criticism. Mavlian said photography was central to Export’s practice, particularly in the Body Configurations series, where the artist positioned her body against urban architecture in distorted or restrictive poses.

According to Mavlian, Export was among the first women artists to critically examine representations of women through photography and film while simultaneously using those media as tools of resistance. She referenced comments Export made during a 2024 exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, where the artist said feminist practitioners of the 1960s used the film camera “to see things with our own eyes, with our own thoughts.”

Export emerged in Austria during a period of growing experimental and political art movements in Europe. Her work combined performance, photography, film and conceptual art, frequently centring the body as a site of political struggle and social critique. Many of her best-known works challenged the passive representation of women in cinema, advertising and visual culture.

Her influence extended across generations of feminist artists, performers and theorists, particularly those examining surveillance, spectatorship, bodily autonomy and media representation. Scholars have frequently situated Export alongside artists such as Yoko Ono and other pioneers of postwar feminist performance art whose work reshaped institutional understandings of authorship, gender and participation.

The renewed attention following Export’s death has also prompted broader reflection on the legacy of radical feminist art movements that emerged in Europe and North America during the late 1960s and 1970s, many of which directly challenged prevailing attitudes toward sexuality, censorship and the visibility of women’s bodies.

Export’s works continue to be exhibited internationally and remain central to discussions of feminist conceptual art, experimental cinema and performance history.