Valie Export
Charim Galerie
The pack of Smart Export cigarettes, an Austrian brand, looks a bit worse for the wear—but it is an icon. Accordingly, it is displayed in the foyer in the celebratory manner reserved for relics. The initiated will experience a mild thrill: This is the one, the legendary pack that Valie Export immortalized in the photograph that marked the feminist big bang in the patriarchal-clerical old Vienna of 1967 and which has since made it into practically every publication on the artist.
“Export—always and everywhere,” she once remarked, “that is to say, exporting myself.” And it was meant as a reference