"A Despota"

gelatin silver print (analogue) on Ilford FB baryta

signed and numbered on verso, certificated

In these works, EXPORT, a self-proclaimed feminist, used her body as a measuring and pointing device, encircling the curve of a curb or conforming to the angle of a corner—actions designed to defy the conformist culture of her native Austria in the postwar period. Most of the pictures from this series, Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations), are accentuated with black or red lines added in ink to the print. The failed conformity with the architectural structures, the geometric lines applied to the photographs, and the figure’s uneasy gymnastics emphasize the tension between the individual and the ideological and social forces that shape urban reality, registering the psychological effects of the built and natural environments.
(source: MoMA, Gallery label from The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, April 16, 2012–April 29, 2013)

The print is from a limited series published by the Albertina on the occasion of the exhibition VALIE EXPORT Retrospective at the Albertina, Vienna from June 23 to October 1, 2023.
This exhibition ranges from EXPORT’s pioneering early feminist actions such as the TAPP und TASTKINO (1968) to her provocative performances (ASEMIA – The Inability to Express Oneself through Facial Expressions, 1973) and multilayered installations (I [beat (it)] II, 1980) and on to the group of works known as the Körperkonfigurationen (1972–82), on which she worked consistently over many years. Whether for documentary purposes, as experimentation, or in the form of independent works, photography plays a central role in EXPORT’s feminist and sociopolitical inquiries. Interfacing with film, video, and body art, such photography permits new insights into the artist’s work, which stands out for the ways in which subject and space, performance and visual image, body and gaze, and femininity and representation interrelate.
(Albertina, Vienna)

The photograph was taken in 1982 at the Temple of Theseus on Heldenplatz in Vienna. The Temple of Theseus was built between 1819 and 1823 by the court architect Peter von Nobile and was intended to house a single contemporary work of art: Antonio Canova's white marble sculpture Theseus Defeats the Centaur. For almost seventy years, the masterpiece stood alone in the Temple of Theseus until 1890, when it was moved to the newly completed Kunsthistorisches Museum, where it can still be found on the grand staircase.
(Christoph Fuchs)

The Heldenplatz and the Hofburg have been thematized several times in the visual arts after 1945, especially in performative works: Among others, Günter Brus Wiener Spaziergang begins here, VALIE EXPORT photographed herself in dialogue with the building complex, and Julius Deutschbauer staged an action in the premises of the Presidential Chancellery. As individuals, artists have staged a juxtaposition or confrontation of subjective, artistic perception with the symbolism of the victory of monarchy and state power at this location, contrasting the means of contemporary, performative media with an architecture whose dominantly baroque and classicist world of signs articulated, among other things, the "God-ordained" Catholic order of the Holy Roman Empire. These works unfold their specific complexity by playing, so to speak, against an abandoned backdrop, one that also served as a stage for the Third Reich after the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Still, this ensemble of magnificent buildings stands for a power that reigns down to the cells of the individual body. It has become less tangible and is called into consciousness by the artists and the artist by means of this backdrop. After its many incarnations, Heldenplatz thus experiences its darkest, that of the memorial. 
(Johanna Schwanberg, "Kunst(re)aktionen: Günter Brus - VALIE EXPORT - Julius Deutschbauer," in Maria Welzig, Anna Stuhlpfarrer (eds.), Kulturquatiere in ehemaligen Residenzen. Zwischen imperialer Kulisse und urbaner Neubesetzung, 2018, p. 71.)

More works from the series Body Configurations on the artist's website www.valieexport.at