Graduate student Nathan Stobaugh presented Queerer Mirrors: Identification and Disidentification in VALIE EXPORT's Television and Cinema at The Barnes Foundation 26th Annual Graduate Symposium.

The work of multi-media and performance artist VALIE EXPORT (born 1940) offers an opportunity to reconsider what was at stake for artists engaging with—which is to say, simultaneously critiquing and attempting to harness—various forms of mass communication around the 1970s. Against the backdrop of the artist’s personal library and archive, this talk draws focus on artworks and scenes from EXPORT’s feature films that foreground instances of identification, the psychological process by which an individual assimilates aspects of a model as constitutive of their own identity. Attentiveness to identification occasions an acknowledgment of the underrecognized ways in which same-sex eros figures in the artist’s work, as well as how that work might offer new opportunities to apprehend our relationships to the various media that give us shape.