C A C H E Feminist Aesthetics and Archival Processes

Location: Austria, Linz
Written by:
Nina Hoechtl
Nina Hoechtl is a visual artist, researcher, curator and teacher. Based in UNAM’s Center of Gender Research and Studies (CIEG), Hoechtl conceives and practice research as a transdisciplinary endeavor combining artistic, archival and analytical practices with the study of visual arts, in particular visual culture...

By Nina Hoechtl

08/11/2024 – 12/01/2025

Located at the end of the permanent collection exhibition of the Lentos Art Museum, Linz, Austria, a small yet compelling exhibition opened in the Museum’s Reading Room in early November 2024. The exhibition artistically and performatively engages with a unique archive of working materials related to performance and media art.

Titled C A C H E – Feminist Aesthetics and Archival Processes, the exhibition features four contemporary womxn artists who created an engaging combination of projects drawn from original working materials collected by VALIE EXPORT since the 1960s. These materials include a wide array of documents such as notes, sketches, drawings, typescripts, concepts, correspondence, press clippings, lecture manuscripts, scripts, photographs, slides, videos, and models. They not only offer insight into EXPORT’s multifaceted praxis as a feminist artist, curator, author, and educator but also provide a window into her artistic research and production processes. Psychoanalyst, writer, and curator Suely Rolnik addresses the concept of “archive mania” in contemporary art, suggesting that archival matter must activate the “critical acuteness” of the past’s “seeds of futures” to revitalize and reinvigorate experiences: “The critical-poetic force of these archives can in this manner come together with the forces of creation active today”. [1]

Since November 2017, EXPORT’s personal library and extensive current estate have been accessible to researchers and the public at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz[2]. Located in the former Tabakfabrik (tobacco factory), designed by Peter Behrens in the 1920s and just a short walk from EXPORT’s childhood home, the archive is situated in an area deeply tied to the artist’s personal and professional history. The brand name VALIE EXPORT, adopted in 1967, was inspired by the SMART EXPORT cigarette packaging produced at this very factory. Though subtle, the archive reveals how EXPORT fostered creative connections across various media and activities, including founding cooperatives, organizing film festivals, and curating exhibitions with other feminist and womxn artists, filmmakers, and cultural workers. These collaborations challenged disciplinary boundaries, genres, and the historical and ideological frameworks that had traditionally defined and shaped artistic production.

In the Reading Room of the Lentos Art Museum, various concepts of archiving interact with and reflect on the four projects created by Tabea Borchardt, Anne Glassner, Claudia Larcher, and Katrin Mayer as part of the Center’s 2023/24 scholarship program for artists and arts-based researchers. Selected through a competitive process, the scholarship includes a monthly grant and workspace at the Center for 6 to 8 months, supporting fellows to develop themes resonant with their practice, “in any language or without language,” as outlined in the program call. This presents a unique creative challenge for artists who do not speak German.

In the Reading Room, words such as Vorlassbewusstsein (Awareness of Premature Legacy), Zwischenspeicher (Cache), and Einschreibung (Inscription) are written on the walls at various heights, functioning as a guide for visitors. These concepts form the basis of Tabea Borchardt’s work txt (2023/24), reflecting her passion for words and their meanings, particularly concerning the archive. Through visual and process-driven explorations, Borchardt encourages viewers to question legacy, archiving, artistic processes, and display forms. In Prozessuales Denken (Processual Thinking) (2023/24), copies of original documents, sketches, and texts are laid out on a table, inviting visitors to delve into the artist’s thought processes. Meanwhile, Studio Notes #1 (2023) reveals how archival notes lose clarity over time, suggesting that only the photographic image can preserve information long-term.

At the opening, above the word Einschreibung (Inscription), Anna Glassner engaged with EXPORT’s Body Configurations (1972–1982) through a live performance. Adopting a lying/sleeping position and wearing a turquoise overall, Glassner’s performance references EXPORT’s photographic series, which explores the relationship between body language and urban space, as well as the position of women in public spaces. Over fifty years later, Glassner’s performance, Do Archives Sleep? (2023/24), maps locations in Vienna where EXPORT created works, including Linz’s Tabakfabrik, which now houses EXPORT’s archive. Glassner’s use of turquoise in both her performance outfit and in Expanding (2024)—a banner displaying her reclining figure outside the Museum—draws a connection to the Tabakfabrik’s own history. In the Reading Room, a duvet on the floor acts as a “thoughts archive,” making visible internal processes.

In front of the word Rückkopplung (Feedback), a slide projector illuminates eighty “historical images” on a vintage screen, evoking the atmosphere of a traditional analog archive. Claudia Larcher integrates artificial intelligence (AI) into her practice, creating a dynamic and ever-expanding fictional visual archive. In AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation (2022–24), Larcher reimagines history through the lenses of inclusion and diversity, actively challenging gender and racial biases in historical datasets. This collection, open to data mining, is distributed across digital platforms to inform and train future AI models, thus contributing to developing more inclusive and nuanced AI systems.

At the center of the words Sequenzanalyse (Sequence Analysis), Zwischenspeicher (Cache), and Verwahrensvergessen (Preservative Forgetting), thirty-four books lie on a table. These books were documented by Katrin Mayer during her research in EXPORT’s extensive library at the Center, with some later acquired from second-hand bookstores. Mayer’s selection was guided by interests such as feminism, computer science, artificial intelligence, and brain research. In Rose Intelligence (2024), an audiotext accompanying the books[3], Mayer extracts sentences from these works, reassembling them into new networks of meaning. This process mirrors the functioning of AI while harkening back to earlier analog methods and invites reflection on contemporary technology-driven lives and social structures.

The exhibition examines the power dynamics and ethical-political implications surrounding authority, authorship, authorization, and AI in the context of engaging with a feminist artist’s archive. Installed in the Reading Room, the four projects converge and provoke thought by blending engagement and estrangement. They suggest interdependency while preserving singularities and multiplicities, both in the artists’ individual works and the archive they drew from. In their fragmentary, tactile, and face-to-face display, these works invite human interpretation, resisting reprocessing by AI. Although their content is carefully curated, the exhibition remains open-ended, much like the content of any archive, inviting further engagement or, as Rolnik (2011) suggests, the further activation of the “critical acuteness” of the present’s “seeds of futures.

The day following the opening, the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz organized a workshop in collaboration with the research network Kulturtechniken des Sammelns (Cultural Techniques of Collecting) at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Titled ARTISTS’ ARCHIVES: DOCUMENTS AND DOMICILES OF ARTISTIC PRACTICES, the workshop featured five curators who discussed their approaches to artists’ archives, offering insights into the personal collections of Tomislav Gotovac, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, Zofia Kulik, Gabriele Stötzer, and the Künstlerinnengruppe (women artists group) of Erfurt. Curators Darko Šimičić, Julia Heunemann, Nathalie Hoyos, Rainald Schumacher, and Franziska Schmidt emphasized the archive as a museum, the transgression of mail art as an archival practice, archiving as both a tool and an artwork, and the archiving of feminist artistic practices. Their presentations highlighted the importance of paying attention to margins, footnotes, and traces to locate works, artists, and gaps in the archive. Both the workshop and the exhibition provide spaces for reflection on what it means to do archival research. Archival research extends beyond traditional academia, including artistic practices, workshopping, writing, creating, exhibiting, and engaging with marginalia, footnotes, anecdotes, and absent materials. In this context, both artists and curators demonstrate that archival research entails the intangible work of disentangling, excavating, fostering, imagining, and refusing to ignore what has been forgotten, erased, or silenced. Such intangible work also means creating other methods when existing ones fall short.


All images by Violetta Wakolbinger, 2024.

[1] Rolnik, S. (2011). Archive mania. In 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 022, p. 17.

[2] VALIE EXPORT Center Linz. (n.d.). Retrieved January 31, 2025, from https://www.valieexportcenter.at/

[3] Rose Intelligence. (2024). C0da. Retrieved from https://www.c0da.org/contributions/rose-intelligence

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