Soon at the SCHIRN: Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca. The Tunnels We Dig

The SCHIRN is presenting the first major solo exhibition by Bárbara Wagner (*1980) & Benjamin de Burca (*1975) in Germany. For over a decade, the artist duo has been creating video works and installations in collaboration with cultural movements and collective practices that exist outside established venues and beyond the contemporary art scene.

The eponymous tunnels can be understood both as a physical structure and as a metaphor for artistic expression, cultural resistance, and the negotiation of identity. The film installations in the exhibition depict locally rooted, now intergenerational scenes that originally emerged as youth movements during the 1970s and 1980s, developing their own distinctive cultural or musical structures and systems of reference.

At the core of the exhibition is the newly commissioned production “Future of Yesterday” (2026). This work focuses on the hardcore scene in Germany, and in particular Straight Edge (“sXe” for short), a movement that originated on the East Coast of the United States as “clean” counterculture within the post-hardcore punk of the 1980s. Wagner & de Burca situate these scenes at the SCHIRN alongside other music movements. One of their earliest works “Estás vendo coisas / You are seeing things” (2016) examines the Brega scene from Recife, which emerged in northeast Brazil during the 1970s. The video installation “RISE” (2018) focuses on first or second generation Canadians of Afro-Caribbean descent, who in an act of self-empowerment, artistically appropriate the public space of Toronto’s subway system.

The exhibition’s audiovisual works powerfully address pressing sociopolitical concerns within the performers’ communities, drawing on cultural forms of expression through which they articulate identity and find a collective voice. Central to Wagner & de Burca’s artistic practice is a collaborative approach: the groups portrayed are actively involved in shaping the script, set design, music, choreography, and staging.