Pınar Öğrenci: Good Luck in Germany
Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA, MA
The 2026 Busch-Reisinger Museum Lecture 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, here at the Harvard Art Museums. The film examines the construction of postwar German identity in the Ruhrgebiet, a heavily industrialized region known for coal mining and steel production, as shaped by layered experiences of survival, resistance, and resilience. In it, Öğrenci applies a feminist lens, broadening the history of industrial labor beyond the male worker and the factory. The lecture brings Glück auf in Deutschland into conversation with Öğrenci’s other films, exploring filmmaking as a political practice through which the history of “guest workers” can be connected to ongoing struggles around labor, migration, and belonging. The exhibition Pınar Öğrenci: Glück auf in Deutschland (April 16, 2026–October 18, 2026) includes the 2024 film Glück auf in Deutschland (Good Luck in Germany) as well as five related collages that reimagine the bodies of workers and their families within the Ruhr landscape and its architecture. Öğrenci’s use of the…