Birgit Brenner
Who Is Happy
27 April – 1 June 2024
Opening during the spring tour of the SpinnereiGalerien:
Saturday, April 27, 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Sunday, April 28, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.
It’s done. Birgit Brenner has put out the lights of the world for good. Her “farewell” thus echoes only wearily and powered by LED as a last salute to the old world. A rundown eternal light bereft of meaning, as if lying in state in an open dice-blackness, the caricature of a world that believed only in… what was it? In science, the divine, the supremacy of the human species, or after all only in beautiful illusion. Being has meanwhile become stone for Brenner.
WHO IS HAPPY thereby unquestionably becomes a paraphrase of life, rigidified in the cold, solidified lava stream. A fang-sharp threat, speechlessly hissed from invisible mouths, surely from the gullet of “Some Wolf”. A swan song for humanity, whipped up to a weird murmur in a last hot squall: oh “Long Way Back”. Except that going back is no longer an option here. Tears don’t lie, after all, and Brenner thus has the whole thing, as a fundamentally rotten wetness, slap into the great Nothingness.
A valley of life petrified into a karst vale reveals itself in a fake, silhouette-like background. And that, “Even After All”, no less. Birgit Brenner holds up to our eyes the summit of capitalistic insanity as a mirror on the ceiling. A kind of “Sistine” cupola show, calling into our pictorial memory the first of the seven plagues from the Revelations of John. Brenner now lets a “Grille”, a cricket, of all things, shoot down upon us from the heights like a threatening gesture from the Old Testament, transforming human inadequacy in two ways into a timely, but no less apocalyptic power of interpretation. The world’s currently most expensive piece of jewelry, an ossified diamond zombie, dangles as a degenerated “cricket” over our heads. We thereby look straight into the sparkling void of the seemingly beautiful grimace of insatiable greed.
Heavenly signs tend toward unshakeable earthly messages. Oh my God.
“Welcome to the Territory”, then. Screw up your courage. Diamonds don’t bleed.
Birgit Brenner’s Anthropocene is wasteland.
Alea iacta est. The last of its kind is in mourning.
Raise your glasses, “YOU NEXT!"
He who is without a spine, fear not.
Text by Marion Taube
