VALIE EXPORT
HOMOMETER (1973)
©️ VALIE EXPORT / Bildrecht, Vienna 2024
Dates
20.9.2024–16.2.2025
Details
Five black-and-white photographs, 29.6 × 39.6 cm each
Location
Neue Galerie Graz, Graz
Part of
Horror Patriae: Exhibition
Production specifics
Courtesy of VALIE EXPORT
With huge loaves of bread attached to her legs, the artist drags herself through the sand, emerges from the sea, and walks back into it after a while, leaving the impression that she may have committed suicide. In HOMOMETER, VALIE EXPORT provocatively rethinks bread—traditionally a symbol of motherhood, birth, and resurrection—as a heavy and oppressive burden, carried predominantly by women.
As a pioneering feminist artist, EXPORT exposed and attacked the violent dimension of the highly praised traditional domestic order. Her chief inspiration for this performance was Du pain et du bled (On Bread and the Hinterland, 1774), an essay by the prolific and mysterious writer Simon N. H. Linguet (1736–1794), guillotined during the French Revolution for discrediting the nutrition of the people. Linguet saw bread as a “slow poison” and source of addiction, and held it responsible for all human vices, including slavery and despotism.
Retrospective
Retrospective