Better Than Tomorrow - Birgit Brenner

In the organizer's words:

Birgit Brenner

Birgit Brenner's works are dedicated to various social and private conditions and their complexity in her very own visual language. Her installations, videos, sculptures and drawings can be understood as film stills that always function as excerpts from a larger narrative. In "Better Than Tomorrow", works from recent years enter into a dialog with one another. They question man-made structures and systems, especially with regard to the absurdity of moving between creative innovation and destructive power.

Brenner's works increasingly focus on the irreversible consequences of human influence on the planet in the age of the Anthropocene. Alongside themes such as injustice, power and fear, aspects of environmental destruction and the finite nature of natural resources are increasingly playing a role. They take us into a science fiction-like future scenario and pose the question: what influence do humans have on the earth and what traces do we and our ideas leave behind?

The eponymous installation "Who Is Happy" plays a central role in this: Broken and provisionally supported, it stands alone in the room, blinking to itself. It spans a wide arc from the private sphere to seemingly irreversible global processes that make an apocalypse seem within reach.

Birgit Brenner (*1964) completed her master's degree at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1996 and has been a professor of installation at the Stuttgart State Academy of the Arts since 2007. She was a Villa Massimo scholarship holder in Rome in 2020 and winner of the Wolfsburg Art Prize in 2020.