Image: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge
'Pınar Öğrenci: Glück auf in Deutschland' is on view at the Harvard Art Museums from April 16 through October 18, 2026. The exhibition is Öğrenci’s first major U.S. exhibition.
It includes Öğrenci’s 2024 film, five related collages, and historical photographs from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection. Together, the exhibition reflects on memory, labor, and belonging.
The film examines the construction of postwar German identity in the Ruhrgebiet, a heavily industrialized region known for coal mining and steel production. In it, Öğrenci uses a feminist lens, broadening the history of industrial labor beyond the male worker and the factory.
The five related collages reimagine the bodies of workers and their families within the Ruhr landscape and its architecture. Öğrenci’s use of the phrase ‘Glück auf’—a common way that miners wish one another a safe return after their physically grueling and dangerous work underground—resonates with the experiences of immigrant communities in present-day Germany facing right-wing extremism.
Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci will discuss her 2024 film ‘Glück auf in Deutschland’ (‘Good Luck in Germany’), which is featured in her first major exhibition in the United States at the Harvard Art Museums.
