Ruin
May 9–November 22, 2026
Venice
Italy
The German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale presents Ruin, an exhibition by Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt. ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for International Relations) is the commissioner of the German contribution to the biennial.
Ruin is a space in which the polychronic traces of physical and social structures, German ideologies, and lives once lived remain materially present. With formal vocabularies spanning minimalist clarity and maximalist opulence, Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu actively grapple with the architecture of the German Pavilion, using it as an ambiguous mirror for contemporary social dynamics. The exhibition takes its title from the term’s semantic plasticity: ruin describes not only the decay of physical structures, but also gestures toward bankruptcy—whether financial, political, or moral. Phantom spaces of East German history—the vanished GDR Pavilion, the demolished Palace of the Republic, the burning Sunflower House in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where a 1992 pogrom targeted asylum seekers, former Vietnamese contract workers of East Germany, and other migrant communities—serve as curatorial blueprints for addressing how historical absences create zones of broken time that can be reconfigured through artistic imagination. The works presented here address not a past that has passed, but one that is perhaps even more present and tangible today.
Sung Tieu envelops the pavilion’s monumental façade, shaped by its 1938 reconstruction under National Socialism, in a trompe-l’œil mosaic. The mosaic renders the skeletal remains of a prefabricated apartment block on Gehrenseestrasse in East Berlin—once the artist’s childhood home and one of the largest dormitory complexes for Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR, later inhabited by successive migrant communities after reunification. Hundreds of thousands of marble tesserae simulate the surface and fractures of a structure originally conceived as a paradigmatic form of socialist egalitarian housing. Oscillating between illusion and index, the work mobilizes biography not as narrative, but as a point of entry into broader historical continuities of administrative control, surveillance, and erasure. Transposed onto the overdetermined architecture of the German Pavilion, the façade produces a dissonant overlay in which two incompatible systems of representation are held in tension. Within the pavilion’s inner wings, Tieu extends this inquiry through a group of works dedicated to her mother, foregrounding her experience of life and labor as both materially specific and structurally embedded within these same regimes.
Henrike Naumann reflects on socio-political issues through interior design, exploring the friction between opposing political opinions in relation to taste and personal everyday aesthetics. Her immersive readymade-object installation in the pavilion’s main space melds references to the postwar period in East and West Germany into an “archaeological prehistory of the present,” in which East Germany becomes an inner front—a border that will not disappear. Working with the set pieces of a past that will not pass, Naumann offers a glimpse into a future-past that can become a present reality sooner than expected. Objects are set against a mint-green backdrop evoking the wall color of former Soviet army barracks in the GDR, while a relief of chairs and lines of curtains deepens a central artistic theme: homeyness as a parallel-operating emotional space.
A performance by the Venetian vertical dance group Il Posto will inaugurate the installation by Henrike Naumann and recur on selected dates throughout the course of the biennial. The preliminary dates are May 7, May 9, September 12, and November 21. More to follow. Please find further information on the pavilion’s website.
From her nomination in May 2025 until her sudden death in February 2026, Henrike Naumann worked intensively on her contribution to the German Pavilion, completing the work before she passed. The team of the German Pavilion has been working alongside her studio team to bring her artistic vision to life.
Together, Naumann and Tieu’s interventions transform the German Pavilion’s architecture and historical resonances into sites of reflection and resistance—mobilizing ruin not as a noun, but as a verb, referring to the ongoing processes of ruination triggered by current political endeavors to silence how history is told from the margins.
In November, the final week of the show is dedicated to discursive events in Venice, focusing on the works by Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann. The program is organized in cooperation with Eva Bentcheva (TUD Dresden University of Technology) and Matteo Bertelé (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).
Curator: Kathleen Reinhardt / Artists: Henrike Naumann, Sung Tieu / Commissioner: ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
The accompanying catalog will be publshed by DISTANZ.
Press contact: Jana von Ohlen, Bureau N, +49 30 62736102, presse@deutscher-pavillon.org
The German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale is realized by ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen on behalf of and funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. Initial Partner: ifa Freunde des Deutschen Pavillons, Partner: Sparkassen Finanzgruppe.
