Galerie Tanja Wagner is pleased to present Glück auf in Deutschland, our first solo exhibition by Pınar Öğrenci.

Pınar Öğrenci’s work deftly drops the past into our laps, making it clear that we need to care for it if we want to live differently today and tomorrow.

At documenta 15, the Kurdish artist with a Turkish passport drew notice with her film Aşît. Her new project climbs down into the archives of the history of guest workers in the Ruhr and comes back up with lives and images that have languished in obscurity. She presents the bodies and voices of people who labored for decades to help rebuild Germany and yet are labeled migrants and pushed to the sidelines even today. And she brings into focus the degradation and violence Germany visited upon its new migrant working class only years after the Holocaust.

Öğrenci searched the photographic archive of the Ruhrmuseum in Essen to look for visual traces of the first generation of guest workers and found—almost nothing. The Fördergemeinschaft für Bergmannstradition—Linker Niederrhein, an organization dedicated to preserving the traditions of mining communities, at least had a few photographs. In the decades between 1955, when the first recruitment agreements with countries in southern Europe and the Global South were signed (Turkey followed in 1961), and 1982, the mining industry and mining culture were captured in numerous sometimes lavish photo documentaries—but those exclusively show white German faces and bodies, staged as symbolic ideals for the purposes of Krupp & Co.’s lobbying and propaganda campaigns. In fact, the documentaries were bankrolled by the industry. Guest workers were literally edited out.

So Öğrenci listened to the oral histories of protagonists in the Ruhr who still have personal recollections of the unrepresented migrant past, or who research this history. She gathered her findings in three works, produced in part at the invitation of the Kunstmuseum Bochum, where she has a concurrent second exhibition. They provide insight into dark chapters of German economic and social history that are by no means in the past but in fact still being written. Though Öğrenci’s art is pointed and unsettling in its critique, her poetic forms always also open up their themes to human understanding, to an acknowledgment of the value and dignity of diminished lives.

Glück auf in Deutschland
Film, 44 min, 2024

Pınar Öğrenci montages black-and-white photographs in a documentary film that introduces viewers to industry and life in the postwar Ruhr. The artist’s offscreen voice guides through the film; she opens with a lament from the Turkish poem Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca, comments on the images, and interviews experts who shed light on the context in which the guest workers’ stories were set. Öğrenci’s film unfurls a piece of German as well as German-Turkish history that has rarely been told. Take the burial of Bertha Krupp in 1957 (the “Big Bertha,” a howitzer made by the Krupp conglomerate that was used in World War I and also sold in large numbers to the Ottoman Empire, was named after her): once her body was in the ground, photographs show, Krupp workers began to rally, there was protest, an instant of resistance. Another largely unknown episode—and here the film, close to the end, is suddenly in color, with footage shot by Öğrenci herself: a Nazi-era camp for forced labor built and used by the Krupps was later repurposed to house guest workers. The terms change, the levels of violence and danger change. The principle remains the same.

Öğrenci’s approach in Glück auf in Deutschland is similar to the one in her film Gurbet Is a Home Now (2020), which combines archival material and interviews to document the history of guest workers’ homes in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Foregrounding the voices of women, it uncovers a virtually unknown facet of the city’s past.

Glück auf in Deutschland
Photo collages, 2024

Öğrenci recently branched out into a new form: collage. Drawing on sources that also went into her film, the artist takes a playful approach to fraught photographic material. Her arrangement of images points up that the much-vaunted miners’ traditions are a construct, a symbolic idealization designed to tell the history of the wastage of bodies and lives in coalmining as a story of heroism rather than exploitation. And one in which men are the heroes, while the women—as Öğrenci’s film has made us see—labored without pay to produce the basis for their partners’ breadwinning toil. The artist, who studied architecture in Istanbul and practiced for many years before defecting to film and fine art, takes the scissors to collieries and steel mills to compose a cogent visualization of a politics of bodies.

I Wish You Luck
5-channel video installation, 4 min, 2024

What we see also speaks to the roles women play and their ownership stake in the tradition. In the third room of her exhibition, Pınar Öğrenci has mounted five screens for portraits on film of women who whistle. They whistle the Steigerlied, the folkloristic main attraction in the German miners’ songbook, also known by its first words: Glück auf, or Good luck! But we might not have known that whistling is strictly forbidden down in the pit, where escaping methane, which can explode tunnels and kill miners, seeps out of the rocks with a whistling sound. So shush!

Still, these women whistle. Öğrenci approached miners’ choruses—clubs invariably dominated by ethnic German men—in hopes of recording their singing or obtaining permission to use existing recordings, but in vain. They would not give a woman, and one from Turkey, access to their voices and songs. So the artist instead brought in Turkish and Kurdish women who were happy to lend their voices to the project, and they now whistle their own Good luck!

The Man That Doesn’t Burn
Digital print on glass, 2024

We still need to talk about lungs, and about fire. A large archival image installed in the gallery’s street-facing window, the reproduction of a historic photograph, shows a heat trial. A man sheathed in metal stands next to flames. A body in an aluminum suit is tested to assess its heat resistance: its ability to survive in the industrial complex, which is also the military complex. Here is one of the bodies that German guest-worker programs subjugated and, in many places, continue to subjugate. We now have a fairly precise idea of how many of these bodies were maimed and never compensated, how many miners died of black lung, how many steelworkers were felled by the heat.

The picture can stand as a programmatic visualization of the body politics to which part of the population is exposed today: working-class people, people classed as migrants or refugees, but also people who are currently given gag orders, barred from their professions, or refused entry into the country because they do not meekly submit to the German raison d’état. Because the temperature is once again rising in Germany, the tone in society and politics is getting harsher, nastier, more exclusionary. The need for heat-proof suits is growing by the day.

Text: Alexander Koch
Translation: Gerrit Jackson

Pınar Öğrenci was born 1973 in Van, Turkey and currently lives and works in Berlin. She was awarded by Villa Romana Preis 2022 and nominated for Böttcher Strasse Kunst Prise 2022 in Bremen. Her works will be included upcoming exhibitions at Disobobedience Archive, Venice Biennial, Biennale Matter of Art Prag, and Fraq Bretagne in Rennes in 2024.

Selected exhibitions: Her works has been exhibited nationally and internationally at group exhibitions including documenta fifteen, Kassel, MAXXI Museum, Rome, 12th Gwangju Biennial, 6th Athens Biennial, the Istanbul off-site project of Sharjah Biennial13, Kunsthalle Bremen, SALT Galata, İstanbul and many others.
Solo exhibitions: Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Hundertwasser Museum Kunst Haus Wien, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm and Depo İstanbul.
Selected screenings: Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Schirn, Frankfurt, Brücke Museum Berlin, Protocinema, New York, Kunst Meran, Merano, İstanbul Modern, Architecture Centre Museum Quarter, Vienna and Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin.