DAI alumna Bárbara Wagner exhibits at De Pont Museum

Bárbara Wagner, alumna of the DAI Art Praxis master’s programme at ArtEZ (Dutch Art Institute), is presenting her first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands together with Benjamin de Burca. The exhibition Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca offers an insight into how they explore different music cultures and communities through a collaborative approach. The exhibition is on show at De Pont Museum in Tilburg until 28 February 2027.

At the centre of the exhibition at De Pont Museum is the recent video work Future of Yesterday. In this work, Wagner & de Burca focus on the German hardcore scene, with particular attention to the Straight Edge movement (sXe). This movement emerged on the east coast of the United States in the 1980s as a counterculture within the post-hardcore punk scene. With Future of Yesterday, the artists explore the German hardcore scene in relation to other underground music scenes.

At De Pont Museum, the work is deliberately presented alongside Estás vendo coisas / You are seeing things (2016), an early work by Wagner & de Burca from the museum’s collection. This work focuses on the brega scene in Recife, Wagner’s birthplace. Brega is a music culture with local roots that emerged in northeastern Brazil in the 1970s.

Wagner lives and works in Recife, Brazil. Since graduating from the DAI Art Praxis master’s programme in 2012, she has developed a body of work with De Burca that has received international attention. An important characteristic of their practice is the way they collaborate with the communities they portray in their work. These communities are not only the subject of their work, but also actively contribute to the script, set, music, choreography and staging.

Wagner’s solo work has previously been shown at institutions including MASP (2022), New Museum (2022), ICA Boston (2022) and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2026). Her films and installations are part of public collections including those of MoMA (New York), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), The Arts Council Collection (Dublin) and MASP (São Paulo).

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