Sovereign Canvases: The Defiant Legacies of VALIE EXPORT and Dame Jools Topp

The global history of clothing-optional advocacy and body sovereignty has lost one of its most unapologetic, barrier-breaking architects. Valie Export, the visionary Austrian performance artist and avant-garde filmmaker who spent decades confronting the deep-seated misogyny of mass media and institutional society with the undeniable truth of her own naked body, passed away on 15 May 2026 in Vienna at the age of 85. Her longtime gallerist, Thaddaeus Ropac, confirmed that her passing at an Austrian capital hospital followed complications from a fall sustained at her home. 

Operating far beyond the safe boundaries of traditional studios, Export transformed public spaces into raw, confrontational theatres. By stripping away the commercialised "flowery wallpaper" used by mass media to objectify the female form, she weaponised public nudity as a sophisticated tool of political, aesthetic, and philosophical liberation. 

Cinematic Subversion: Genital Panic and the Touch Cinema

Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria, in 1940, her early worldview was forged in direct opposition to the restrictive, fossilised social structures of post-war Vienna — a realm she explicitly defined as heavily influenced by religious conservatism and legacy systemic oppression. Rejecting the patriarchal tradition of bearing either her father’s or her ex-husband’s surname, she legally constructed her own independent identity in 1967. Styling her new moniker in all-capital letters, VALIE EXPORT, she merged a personal nickname with the branding of a popular Austrian cigarette package, Smart Export, effectively turning herself into a self-governed trademark. 

Export achieved international prominence through two radically provocative performance pieces staged in the late 1960s that directly challenged the public's relationship with nudity and voyeurism:

• Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968): Export entered a Munich movie theatre wearing a pair of custom-altered, crotchless trousers, placing her exposed genitals directly within the immediate sightline of seated filmgoers as she walked down the aisle. "Now you will see in reality what you normally see on the screen," she announced to the audience, actively dismantling the safe distance of cinematic voyeurism. A year later, she immortalised the confrontational work in an iconic photographic series, accessorising the all-black outfit with an industrial machine gun to underscore the militant nature of female body autonomy. 

  
  

  

• Tap and Touch Cinema (1968–1971): Staged across ten major European cities, Export strapped a miniature, curtained aluminium "theatre box" directly over her bare chest. Walking down public streets alongside collaborator Peter Weibel, who operated a megaphone to gather crowds, she invited passing citizens to interact with the art by reaching through the curtains to touch her naked breasts. Crucially, Export maintained intense, unwavering eye contact with each participant during the encounter, shifting the power dynamic from passive objectification to acute personal accountability. 

Remaking the World: The Feminist Manifesto

While her radical physical actions occurred parallel to the notorious Viennese Actionists, Export fiercely insulated her work from their movement. Her creative output developed largely in direct opposition to the systemic violence, extravagance, and inherent misogyny of her male contemporaries. Instead, her work utilised a sophisticated mixture of film, photography, and body art to address structural sexism. 

In 1970, for her landmark piece Body Sign B, she had a permanent garter belt tattooed directly onto her thigh, reclaiming a symbol of historical subjection as an explicit emblem of personal ownership. Her Body Transformations photographic series captured her body physically bending and conforming along stone pavement kerbs and rigid civic architecture, mapping out how the physical structures of modern cities were historically constructed by men, for men, to restrict the natural movement and expression of women. 

As a co-founder of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative and author of the groundbreaking 1972 publication Women’s Art: A Manifesto, Export declared that true liberation required women to completely remake the social and media environments they lived in. Though initially dismissed or ignored by conservative municipal factions, her immense volume of work eventually garnered massive institutional respect. She twice participated in the prestigious Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and made history in 1980 by becoming one of the first two female artists chosen to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale. 

Institutional Preservation and Endless Legacy

The closing decades of Export's career marked a profound global transition from municipal exclusion to worldwide institutional preservation. The walls of the global establishment collapsed as her once-censored performance frameworks were recognised as foundational milestones of modern art history. In 2005, global art icon Marina Abramović restaged seven key works of twentieth-century performance art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, selecting Genital Panic as a featured centerpiece of the exhibition. This was swiftly followed by a comprehensive retrospective of Export's films hosted by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2007. 

Her lasting influence on subsequent generations of radical body autonomy advocates was further showcased in 2016 at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, which hosted a major exhibition pairing Export's archive with modern creators like Lorna Simpson, K8 Hardy, and Hito Steyerl — artists for whom Export's early physical work had fundamentally "blown open doors." 

Export was exceptionally forward-thinking regarding her permanent newsroom and academic legacy. Following extensive, forensic negotiations with the Austrian state in 2017, she successfully opened the Valie Export Center Linz — a dedicated, institutional research centre for media and performance art that permanently houses her vast historical archives. Ms. Export is survived by her sister, Elisabeth Wiener, and her grandson, Patrick Chan. Her second husband, Robert Stockinger, passed away in 2016, and her daughter, Perdita Chan, sadly passed away earlier this year. "She was, up to the end, a fighter," her gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac concluded. "But for so many years and decades, she had to fight." 

The Ultimate Validation of Body Autonomy

The lifelong campaign of VALIE EXPORT delivers an invaluable lesson for modern New Zealand clothing-optional advocates. Our core philosophy has always maintained that the unvarnished human form is non-sexual, natural, and carries an inherent right to exist safely within the public footprint. 

Export took that exact truth and applied it as an artistic hammer. She proved that public nudity, when executed with absolute lucidity and professional intent, is a profound act of cultural sovereignty. She did not strip to accommodate the male gaze; she exposed her skin to shatter it. 

As our newsroom navigates modern battles against digital predators, corporate algorithm tracking, and lazy local council exclusions, Export’s legacy reminds us why we can never afford to be passive or invisible. By documenting our spaces, actively self-policing our perimeters, and refusing to allow our natural state to be generalised by a hyper-sexualised media machine, we honour the trail she blazed. The human body is our own sovereign canvas, and its unvarnished expression remains a freedom worth fighting for.

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Dame Jools Topp, one half of beloved Topp Twins, dies at 68

The deep truth of this philosophy hit with immense, history-shaping weight across New Zealand yesterday following the peaceful passing of Dame Jools Topp, aged 68, at her home on Saturday 23 May 2026. 

Surrounded by her twin sister Dame Lynda, her brother Bruce, and her beloved animals, her departure represents the falling of a mighty tōtara in the country's cultural landscape. While operating in a completely different creative medium than the European avant-garde, Dame Jools shared VALIE EXPORT's exact same raw, uncompromised commitment to physical sovereignty, public defiance, and the systematic dismantling of societal orthodoxy. Growing up on a dairy farm near Huntly, Jools and Lynda forged an artistic identity rooted in raw human experience rather than institutional conditioning — lugging hay, riding horses, and performing spontaneously from the age of five when their mother woke them up from the back of their father's American DeSoto "tank" to ensure they did not miss their chance to sing.

From those country roots, the twins expanded into a formidable force of street-level activism and political subversion during the tumultuous 1980s. They stood fearlessly on the frontlines of the nuclear-free marches, the anti-apartheid Springbok tour protests, and the historic Homosexual Law Reform movement, famously weaponising country-and-western music because they recognized that while people tune out from dry political rhetoric, a song is a communal space everyone can sing together. They actively claimed public spaces as their own sovereign canvas, to the point of being arrested in 1989 for obstructing a footpath while busking on Auckland's Queen Street — spending their night in police custody defiantly singing the blues. By stepping onto stages as "the only comedic yodelling lesbians in the world," they pushed their way directly into the heart of mainstream New Zealand, transforming rigid public perceptions through pure laughter and unyielding visibility. 

Through three seasons of their landmark television programme, Dame Jools masterfully utilised performance to mock and dismantle patriarchal gender roles. While private-life big sister, she brilliantly embraced the softer, relaxed sidekick role on stage, keeping the music precisely locked down to anchor Lynda's boisterous alter egos. In bringing to life cross-dressing working-class caricatures like Ken and Ken, or the iconic Camp Leader bouncing off Camp Mother, the twins achieved a radical coup: they made mainstream society fall in love with queer political satire. When they were appointed Dames Companion to the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2018, Dame Jools characteristically declared the honour an absolute validation of their decades of grassroots defiance, joking that the recognition meant Camp Mother, the Kens, and all their satirical characters had officially been knighted by the state alongside them. 

Most profoundly, Dame Jools embodied the absolute core of body sovereignty during her 22-year journey with breast cancer following her initial diagnosis in 2006. 

Mirroring Valie Export's refusal to let the female form be defined by institutional or commercial frameworks, Dame Jools explicitly demanded that her illness never be described using aggressive, militarised terms like a "battle" or a "fight". She lived with it bravely, stripped away the clinical wallpaper of medical shame, and refused to allow a diagnosis to define her in a limited way. Following her double mastectomy, she and Lynda openly shared their medical journey, fundraising for breast cancer awareness, writing the raw chronicle 'Radiation Burns', and posing topless in a body-painted warrior design for the Pink Ribbon calendar to actively normalise and celebrate the unvarnished reality of mastectomy scars. Waking up every morning declaring she had lived a beautiful life with zero regrets, Dame Jools proved that our physical form belongs entirely to us. Both she and Export established that whether standing against mass media voyeurism in Europe or singing for absolute equality on the streets of New Zealand, they proved that the human body is our own sovereign canvas, and its unvarnished expression remains a freedom worth fighting for.