glatt und fein

Leila Brinkmann, glatt und fein, 2023, Video / Video Installation, 9:04 min © The artist

glatt und fein is a two-channel video installation exploring the construction of the housewife—not as a universal figure, but as a historically contingent role. At its core lies the collection of the Museum of Saxon Folk Art in Dresden, whose objects reveal a specific female everyday experience: doll kitchens, embroidery, and household manuals. These artifacts function not only as testimonies of a past way of life but also as media of discipline and idealization.

The work uncovers a lacuna: the museological invisibility of the historical moment when female labor was reinterpreted from productive to „reproductive“, a transformation motivated not only economically but deeply embedded in social systems of order.

Three object groups are central: embroidery, guidebooks, and toys. Within them, moral imperatives, normative role models, and the subtle mechanisms of gender socialization condense. The installation confronts this aesthetic of self-discipline with documentary imagery and a fragmented soundscape that oscillates between intimate everyday life and ideological overlay.

“It has no moods or feelings, knows no nerves and it would surely be richly rewarded if it were not a machine.”  – Friedrich Otto: Das elektrische Dienstmädchen

Opening of the exhibition “We show what we (don’t) know” of the HGB Leipzig on 12.10.2023 at the Japanisches Palais of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: Oliver Killig

Leila Brinkmann (1992) is a media artist and scenographer. Her interdisciplinary practice combines conceptual research with performative, installative, and cinematic formats. Her work revolves around pop culture, feminist perspectives, and institutional critique, often shaped by a research-based, process-oriented approach. She is interested in fragile material behavior, symbolic systems, and the visibility of structural contradictions.

Brinkmann studied “Expanded Cinema” at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) and has exhibited her work at institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, the Japanisches Palais Dresden, and AundO Kunsthalle. She is part of the music theater collective Schatz & Schande and co-founder of the Leipzig-based cultural association hp_sieben e.V.