Valie Export: Tap, Touch, Burn
Images: Sixpack Film
October 3 – 4, 2026 | At Metrograph, New York
TICKETS FOR OCTOBER 3, 2026 | 4.45 PM
TICKETS FOR OCTOBER 4, 2026 | 3.30 PM & 5.25 PM
The ACFNY and Metrograph, in collaboration with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, present Valie Export: Tap, Touch, Burn, a two-day film program celebrating one of Austria’s most influential avant-garde artists. Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria, Valie Export was a pioneering figure in postwar European experimental art. Working across performance, photography, installation, video, and “expanded cinema,” Export explored the female body as a space for artistic investigation and political resistance. Her work challenged conventions surrounding sexuality, spectatorship, and the structures of power that shape them. Following Export’s death at age 85 in May 2026, this program offers a rare opportunity to experience her cinematic work on the big screen, showcasing both her narrative features and experimental shorts.
Saturday, October 3, 2026 | 4:45 PM | Invisible Adversaries (1977, 110 min.):
Export’s feature debut follows Anna (Susanne Widl), a photographer convinced that extraterrestrial beings known as the “Hyksos” are hastening the decline of civilization. As her paranoia intensifies, reality and hallucination begin to merge. The film combines narrative cinema with experimental montage and explores the psychological and social tensions at the heart of Export’s practice. Introduction by filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
Sunday, October 4, 2026 | 3:30 PM | The Practice of Love (1984, 90 min.)
A feminist reworking of film noir, following a journalist investigating a murderous conspiracy that becomes entangled with her own troubled personal life. Export uses the conventions of the thriller to examine sexuality, objectification, relationships, and the social structures underlying them.
Sunday, October 4, 2026 | 5:25 PM | Valie Export Shorts Program (1966–1986, 56 min.):
A selection of Export’s provocative short films exploring the body—and particularly the female body—as a site of social and political struggle. The program includes Self-Portrait with Head, Touch Cinema, Man & Woman & Animal, ….Remote…..Remote….., Syntagma, and Lust.
Metrograph
Metrograph is an entertainment company founded in 2016, based in New York City and turned into the ultimate destination for movie lovers. A special curated world of cinema inspired by the great New York movie theaters of the 1920s and the Commissaries of the Hollywood Studio backlots, Metrograph is a community inhabited by movie professionals screening their work, taking meetings, watching films, collaborating together. With an audience built around our shared love of cinema.