Dr. Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer 
Susanne Wenger’s painting between Africa and Europe

In her lecture, Austrian art historian, art critic, and curator Brigitte Borchhardt Birbaumer examines Susanne Wenger’s paintings and graphic works as an outstanding example of transcultural art production, in which European modernism and Yorùbá ritual practices are productively intertwined. In doing so, she approaches Wenger not only biographically but also views her work as a ​“total work of art” that emerges from the continuous exchange between Wenger’s European education and her long-standing, ritual-based practice in Òsogbo, Nigeria. Borchhardt Birbaumer demonstrates how Wenger combines traditional religious symbolism with modern artistic strategies, thereby developing a new sacred aesthetic that addresses postcolonial reflections, questions of authenticity, and debates about cultural transgression and performative identity. In her essay — co-authored with Alexandra Schantl — for the volume *Susanne Wenger. Artist. Priestess. Adventurer, co-authored with Alexandra Schantl, she analyzes Wenger’s work as an exemplary fusion of art and ritual, in which Yorùbá cosmologies are not exoticized but understood as a living source of artistic expression.