Unsichtbare Gegner

UNSICHTBARE GEGNER (in collaboration with Peter Weibel)) is the feature-length debut of Valie Export, who has gone down in the history of performance art as the woman who allowed passersby to touch her breasts through a homemade box strapped to her chest and who put media guru Peter Weibel on a leash like a dog. Export also collaborated with Weibel on UNSICHTBARE GEGNER, a media-savvy yet critical bricolage that works its way repeatedly toward a narrative, deconstructing daily life and graphics, hypnosis and man, schizophrenia and clothes, as well as paternalism and video art, into the “uncanny” (self-)experience of the young photographer Anna, transforming it into a feminist version of the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Roswitha Müller). Gertrud Koch saw “a woman’s perspective” at work here, the “practical appropriation of avant-garde art”, that brought together media production and reception loops with the skater’s bloodstains.(cb, bw)