Birgit Brenner

Birgit Brenner studied graphic design in Darmstadt and obtained her diploma from the University of Arts in Berlin. For several years, she has been engaged in constructing biographies of people who ‘fail’ in their lives. They lose their loved ones, succumb to uncertainties, ... Starting from a specific story, she creates variable scenarios where the character is portrayed as a patchwork of emotions and thoughts, marked by different events, forming a complex whole without being one.

She is often conveniently placed within the emancipatory art tradition because she initially started from the female psyche. However, she does not want to be stigmatized as just another feminist artist.

Birgit Brenner creates installations in which only one person speaks, writes, and whose faceless body is shown. This removes all individual characteristics from the present person and creates an opening for subjective interpretation. The spectator can fully immerse themselves in the depicted person’s thought world.

For the exhibition at MDD, she created the installation Muter based on a story by the American author Truman Capote. It revolves around a mother who locks her child in the closet to fully immerse herself in a nocturnal world of crime and pornography. Using text and photo fragments, she outlines the inner world of the now grown-up and traumatized son.