Harvard Art MuseumsHarvard Square, Cambridge
Pınar Öğrenci: Glück auf in Deutschland
This exhibition has ended.
The first major US exhibition by Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci, pairing her 2024 film and five collages on Ruhrgebiet mining life with historical photographs from the Busch-Reisinger.
Museum websiteMore in Boston
In one image, lines of white washing hang to dry in front of smoking factory chimneys. Ruhr mining families dressed in white on purpose, curator Lynette Roth told the Harvard Gazette: a point of pride in a region written off as dirty, and hours of extra laundry for the women.
The heart of the show is Öğrenci's 2024 film, about 44 minutes long, built from 1950s and 1960s photographs, mostly from the Ruhr Museum archive, set against interviews, poetry and personal stories. Its argument: West Germany's postwar boom ran on miners, their wives' unpaid work and labour migrants from Italy, Spain and Türkiye. Five collages hang alongside, with historical photographs from the Busch-Reisinger. You'll want to sit down for this one rather than walk through.
It's free, on Level 1, and closes on 18 October. Öğrenci talks about the film in Menschel Hall at 6pm on 13 October (free, register online), and her installation Cemetery of the Nameless opens at the Goethe-Institut Boston on 15 October.
Look for
Washing against the chimneys
Look for lines of white laundry drying outside factories while the stacks behind them smoke, the miners' wives' answer to the Ruhr's dirty reputation.
Workers wrapped around a factory
In one collage Öğrenci wraps a photograph of workers around an architectural photo, so they seem to take possession of the building.
The Krupp works
The film shows a Krupp factory that used forced labour during the Second World War and carried on as a private business afterwards.
Parades and neighbourhood parties
Soot-covered miners give way to parades, sports, religious ceremonies and children playing in the housing estates built for workers.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Going Solo
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You only have twenty minutes: the heart of the show is a 44-minute film.
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Image credits
5
- From Iran: A Visual TestimonyAzadeh Akhlaghi, via Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
- Harvard Art Museumsajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsBobak Ha'Eri via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
- Peabody Museum of Archaeology & EthnologyDaderot, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- Harvard Museum of Natural Historyajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0