Pınar Öğrenci: Glück Auf in Deutschland

Videostill from Pınar Öğrenci, Glück Auf in Deutschland, 2024, 4:3, 44:50 min., black & white/colour, sound. Images from Ruhr Museum Essen Photography Archive. Courtesy of the artist

- selected by Inke Arns (HMKV) -

 

Öğrenci descends into the archives of the Ruhr region’s guest worker history and brings back lives and images that have lbeen lying dormant. She presents the bodies and voices of people  who contributed to the reconstruction of Germany for decades and are still labelled and marginalised as migrants today.  She highlights the humiliation and violence that Germany inflicted on its new migrant working class just a few years after the Holocaust. In her collages, which are included in the film, Öğrenci takes a playful and critical approach to the incriminating photographic material. Her arrangement of film images and collages  makes it clear that the much-vaunted miner traditions are a construct, a symbolic idealisation intended to tell the story of the waste of bodies and lives in coal mining as a story of heroism rather than exploitation. And one in which men are the heroes, while the women—as Öğrenci’s film shows—toiled without pay to create the basis for their partners’ livelihoods. Öğrenci also points to another secret role of women in the region: they have fought against the closure of mines on the one hand and against air pollution on the other. The artist, who studied architecture, takes the scissors to collieries and steel mills to compose a convincing visualization of a politics of bodies.

Text: Alexander Koch

 

Pınar Öğrenci

Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Wan, Turkey) lives in Berlin. She has a background in architecture, which informs her poetic and experiential video-based work and installations that accumulate traces of ‘material culture’ related to forced displacement across geographies. Her works are decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social and political research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of migration. Öğrenci engages with place, site and architecture as the materialisation of violence. Her practice serves as a response to a collective past often left in silence and urging her audience to imagine a future built on justice, equality, and collective healing. By delving into local archives, she initiates a process of collaborative memory, engaging communities in questioning what has been remembered, erased, or overlooked. Her works invite us to witness the rich, multifaceted layers of survival, resistance, resilience.

Öğrenci was nominated for the Böttcher Strasse Kunst Prize 2022 in Bremen and won the Villa Romana Prize 2023. Her works have been exhibited widely at museums and art institutions including at Venice Biennial (Disobedience Archive, 2024), Harvard Museum (2024), documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018), the Istanbul off-site project for Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2015-6); SALT Galata, Istanbul (2015-6). She had solo exhibitions at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2024), Frac Bretagne, Rennes (2024), Berlinische Galerie (2023), Kunst Haus Wien - Hundertwasser Museum (2017) and Depo Istanbul (2017). Öğrenci worked as guest lecturer in the Master Studies “Raumstrategien” of the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee. She has been invited to give lectures, present film screenings and participate in discussions at Columbia University, UCLA, Berkeley University, Cornell University, HFBK, Städelschule Frankfurt and Venice Art Academy.