Valie Export - Icon and Rebel

Simon de Pury is a familiar face in the art world. The former chairman of Sotheby’s has a larger-than-life personality and is known as the «Mick Jagger of auctions.»

The final part of the Creativity Trilogy explores existential threats our world is facing. An inspiring film about imagination's power and a hopeful glimpse into the future.

A 30 years odyssey: the world's most intriguing artists and thinkers from the fields of visual art, music, filmmaking, acting, literature, philosophy, politics, business and science, are asked the same question: "Why are you creative?"

Storyteller and Conceptual Magician Derek DelGaudio attempts to understand the illusory nature of identity and answer the deceptively simple question 'Who am I?'

Performance artist Marina Abramovic prepares for a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

From the starting point of her admiration for the pioneering Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova (1934-2018), the director poses a question: is cinema made by women really tougher, more violent? Seeking answers, she talks to great contemporary filmmakers like Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, Alice Diop, Céline Sciamma, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Monika Treut, among others. It becomes obvious that the cinema screen is a space for the projection of real social problems and power relations.

OHO is considered one of the most interesting, complex and important examples of post-war avant-garde art in Central and Eastern Europe. After achieving major success as one of the first from Eastern Europe to exhibit at New York's MoMA, the group disbanded in 1971. OHO was not just an art collective but a unique cultural phenomenon that explored the visible and the immaterial through art, philosophy, sociology, science and coexistence with the earth and nature. Already in the 1960s, the group was raising relevant questions about anthropocentrism, ecology and the economics of the art. This documentary about OHO by Damjan Kozole is rich in never-before-seen archival material and, for the first time, comprehensively presents this inspiring phenomenon of intertwining art and life. - Slovenian Film Database

Ulay is a conceptual artist whose photography pushed boundaries, and whose love affair with Marina Abramovic produced some of the best pieces of performance art. Diagnosed with cancer shortly after agreeing to film the documentary, Ulay's illness informs Project Cancer, which is part-retrospective, part-visual document of the year he believed could be the last of his extraordinary life.

A documentary focused on former Vogue Paris editor-in-chief and fashion stylist Carine Roitfeld.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."

Filmed over the course of two years, Our City Dreams is the story of a woman's struggles and successes as an artist in New York City. Told through five women artists, from youngest to oldest, the film features Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, and Nancy Spero. From the studio to the streets of New York, from the canals of Venice to the alleys of Cairo and the beaches of Phuket, Our City Dreams takes us deep into the artists' worlds.

"This video film shows indecency in its modern form. While peddling naked female flesh was considered indecent in the past, we can see by the examples of today´s star athletes that skin full of advertising sells better. The same applies to politicians, of course, though in a more subtle way. Advertising on skin as the new indecency! I consider this film to be a continuation of my previous work with the body as a vehicle for social codes. While in the past it was religion that dictated male and female behaviour, which was also expressed in their physical appearance, business has now assumed this role. Business dictates physical behaviour, physical pressure in its most direct form, and even sets standards for how our bodies are to be represented. Religion no longer prescribes morality, that is now done by the global power of business, with its products and codes. Morality has found a new patron." (Valie Export)

A compilation of erotic films intended to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality.

Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

Viet Flakes was composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam atrocity images, compiled over five years, from foreign magazines and newspapers. Schneemann uses the 8mm camera to “travel” within the photographs, producing a volatile animation.

This film consists entirely of close ups of famous persons' bottoms. Ono meant it to encourage a dialogue for world peace.

“This film deals with exploring one´s surroundings by means of the body, and the exploration of the surrounding body. Not only is something shown in this film, showing itself is shown, not only is something portrayed, portrayal itself is portrayed. A sense of space is created in a way possible only with film: seeing oneself from the front and back simultaneously, from above and below, and from outside in the center of the space. The film combines opposite parts of the space, which form the body´s imperceptible time-space continuum. Space is carried along, just like the camera.” – VALIE EXPORT

The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.

Produced over several years between 1962 and 1967, Grimaces shows the faces of over a hundred artists, gallery owners and critics grimacing to the camera.

Real-life kung fu master Nathan Ingram stars in this gritty, low-budget martial arts epic as a local karate school owner who clashes with a gang of drug traffickers posing as the owners of a rival dojo. Director Charlie Ahearn (who helmed the landmark hip-hop film Wild Style) used the housing projects next to his New York Lower East Side apartment as his central location in this 1979 classic, shot on a vintage Super 8 camera.

Body Collage is a visceral "movement-event" from 1967, in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper, creating a physicalized corporal collage. "My intention was not simply to collage my body (as an object), but to enact movement so that the collage image would be active, found, not predetermined or posed," writes Schneemann.

An unfulfilled man renders himself to the unrealized sensuality of four women. In his drifting search, he fails and fades in the same loneliness as the women.

An innocent youth is abducted and dragged down into a dystopian nightmare where teenage Lydia Lunch throws him into the Black Box.

The almost lyrical Letters to Dad, is a meditation on authority that superimposes the spectre of a recent event over the relatively fresh faces of the parapunk art world; the film takes on a musical form - like a 20th-century ballad composed of subliminal behavior cues, advertising testimonials, and the text of the National Enquirer