This interview was conducted on the occasion of Sung Tieu’s presentation as part of “Ruin,” the exhibition in the German Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt.
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Elisa R. Linn: For many, your work Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable (2026), installed on the Pavilion’s facade, summons the full range of associations carried by the Plattenbau, the late-modernist housing estates that embodied the GDR’s commitment to the “right to housing”: central heating, private bathrooms, medical services, swimming pools, and cultural centers. Once prized for their modern amenities, these estates came to symbolize neglect, precarity, and xenophobic violence during and after the Wende (the Turning Point, 1989–90), traits embodied most notably by the Rostock-Lichtenhagen pogrom against asylum seekers and former contract workers. Broadcast into West German living rooms, images of the violence unfolded against a backdrop of the Plattenbauten being increasingly seen as material witnesses to the inevitable collapse of “actually existing socialism” and to narratives of “catching-up modernization.” Against this aestheticized, fetishized image, your work renders the facade of the Berlin-Lichtenberg dormitory where you grew up: a trompe-l’œil that shifts between the flatness of pixels on a screen and the illusion of full spatial depth, depending on the viewer’s position. To what extent does your facade work challenge the Plattenbau’s role in reunified Germany as a projection surface for simplified, often distorted historical narratives and identities within both East and West German memory cultures?
Sung Tieu: The image is repeatedly read through the familiar narrative of East German identity, while the migrant histories embedded within the building’s specificity recede from view. The nine-block complex, “Objekt Gehrenseestraße,” built from 1977 onward, however, was not one of the desirable prefabricated Plattenbau housing developments associated with socialist prosperity and reserved for East German citizens with particular “social merits.” Rather, it followed a layout based on barracks, reflecting its origins in the military-industrial complex, with only communal kitchen and bathroom facilities, providing less than five square meters of living space per person, where four people shared a single room during the GDR period; in the 1990s, sometimes six to ten people lived in one such room. Initially built to house construction workers, the complex later served as an isolated dormitory primarily for Vietnamese contract workers (with some from Mozambique, Angola, and Cuba), and later for refugees fleeing the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as for other migrant groups. And yet, the image of Gehrenseestraße on the facade of the German Pavilion is still most commonly associated with the standardized housing blocks of the white East German majority. The realities of migrant lives and racialized experiences are frequently relegated to the background—as reflected even in the reviews of this year’s German Pavilion—echoing a broader pattern of racial denial. As Fatima El-Tayeb has described in European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2011), Europe continues to imagine itself through a white cultural memory in which racialized minorities remain structurally absent. Migrants are not simply excluded from history; their presence is continually rendered invisible within it. The reception of the pavilion makes this dynamic strikingly apparent: Even when the work centers on a site whose history is inseparable from migration, labor, and racialization, the dominant reading repeatedly recenters East German identity alone.
EL: How do you think this mirrors the GDR’s rhetoric of socialist “brotherhood,” in which migrants were made visible through what Quinn Slobodian calls “socialist chromatism” yet were rendered politically invisible, despite the state’s official rejection of “race thinking” and its continued reliance on phenotypical and folkloric stereotypes to represent internationalist solidarity?1
ST: This contradiction profoundly shaped many workers’ understanding of their own existence, both through the reality of their lived experience and through the gaze of a state and society that proclaimed international solidarity while withholding full belonging. They were made visible as symbols of socialist internationalism while remaining socially and politically peripheral: welcomed as workers but not imagined or accepted as members of society. I think here of W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. He describes “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”2 What strikes me is his use of the word “measuring.” It captures how power operates not entirely through exclusion but through calculated systems of classification, evaluation, and definition.
EL: This resonates with the meticulous calculation and placement of the facade’s more than three million tesserae, bringing to mind the monumental mural tradition of the GDR, as seen in Walter Womacka’s Unser Leben (Our Life, 1962–64) at the Haus des Lehrers in Berlin. How do you see your facade work engaging with this socialist realist visual language, particularly in relation to the ideological underrepresentation of migrant labor in the GDR?
ST: Womacka’s Unser Leben provides a crucial counterpoint, as I try to structurally and ideologically deconstruct that specific mural tradition. His frieze depicts “ordinary people” as a self-contained narrative of ideological coherence, a seamless vision of collective harmony in which the idealized German “new man” is fully integrated into an architecture of socialist progress. The facade work on the German Pavilion, however, deliberately subverts this logic on both a formal and conceptual level. The image depicted is not one of socialist triumph, but rather the stark opposite. And instead of replacing the socialist archetype with a similarly romanticized representation of the migrant worker—which would merely substitute one form of heroic flattening for another—the work actively resists the impulse of surface-level empowerment. The composition uses the imagery of architectural decay to expose the systemic ruins of the current and past state(s). This subversion is articulated through the trompe-l’œil effect. While Womacka’s mural maintains its illusionistic and graphic cohesion, when viewed up close my work utilizes the optical illusion as a site of friction. From a distance, the facade mimics the authoritative scale and materiality of a state monument, yet, as the viewer approaches, this visual stability collapses. The depiction of the gutted, skeletal concrete structure fractures into distinct pixels and marble fragments, denying a comfortable synthesis. In many ways, I see the work as an anti-monument, employing a well-known medium to address a profound historical amnesia.
EL: Your works in the side galleries of the pavilion seem to disrupt monumentality and collective anonymity, as well as the violence of real abstraction under both socialism and capitalism. I am reminded of Max Frisch’s line: “We called for workers, but human beings came.”3
ST: Although the ideological frameworks of East Germany and socialist Vietnam, on the one hand, and the West, on the other, were different, both systems regulated (and continue to regulate) migrant bodies through systems that restricted mobility, intimacy, and belonging while also rendering those bodies productive—and ultimately interchangeable and disposable—through infrastructural and administrative regimes. KP Brehmer’s diagrams and Steven Willats’s series Brentford Towers or Stanley Brouwn’s This Way Brouwn are exemplary in this regard, showing how subjectivity evades being an object of administration. My works likewise move from objectivity toward the subject. They adopt the language of measurement yet refuse to produce a transparent subject.
EL: What prompted you to draw on Dürer’s theory of human proportion in relation to your mother’s body?
ST: The aluminum wall works are derived from Dürer’s proportional system, an artistic but also epistemological project: It sought to transform the human body into an object that could be measured, reproduced, and represented. I recalibrated the system according to my mother’s body, a body deeply personal to me. The translucent glass casts likewise resist stable categorization; they recall medical casts, anatomical models, and forms of preservation while retaining the vulnerability of the body from which they were taken. They oscillate between evidence and absence, preservation and disappearance. Rather than illustrating labor, they ask what kinds of traces labor leaves and how these can be represented without reducing the body to another object of knowledge.
EL: For the pavilion’s preview and opening, you wore a suit printed with sensationalist newspaper articles. What led you to wear it yourself rather than exhibit it inside the space?
ST: Representing Germany at the Biennale inevitably meant becoming, however temporarily, part of a representative system. Wearing the suit as a racialized subject myself complicated that position. Rather than presenting an image of cultural achievement, I carried an archive of xenophobic media discourse into one of the state’s most visible stages of cultural production. The suit confronted visitors with the everyday language through which racial violence is produced. The news articles were not exceptional documents but widely circulating newspaper texts that repeatedly described migrant housing blocks as sites of criminality inhabited by F****, a racial slur directed at Vietnamese migrants. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, racism does not only express itself through spectacular acts of violence but through the ordinary ways bodies and spaces come to be perceived and named. I wanted these articles from the 1990s, a vital moment in Germany’s consciousness, to circulate once more, not as historical artifacts but as an active entity that continues to show its repercussions. Through my wearing of the suit, this archive entered the social choreography of the Biennale: its opening ceremonies, encounters, conversations, and documentation. The work sought to interrupt the comfort of those rituals in some way.
EL: The graffiti inscribed on the facade—such as “YSL,” “REFUGEES,” “ENZO,” and “Free Ca …”—seem to embody the counter-monumental “tactics” that Michel de Certeau describes: everyday practices employed by those without access to institutional power, yet who nevertheless temporarily appropriate it, in contrast to the “strategies” of governments, corporations, and bureaucracies. What role did your guided tours through the ruins of Gehrenseestraße, which began in 2023, play in preserving not just histories of violence and structural racism, but the histories of such “tactics,” which are threatened with erasure by the complex’s demolition?
ST: From a distance, some visitors assumed the graffiti had been sprayed directly onto the pavilion. That misunderstanding struck me; it briefly collapsed the distinction between representation and intervention. The pavilion itself appeared vulnerable to the same forms of appropriation and “vandalism” (for lack of a better word) that had characterized Gehrenseestraße. Graffiti is an act of inscription, occupation, and communication; it makes a claim to presence. Carefully reproduced from the original site, these pieces of graffiti are traces left by people who had a direct relationship to the site. The complex, of course, was far more than a dormitory organized by the GDR and later the FRG with help from the private sector. It was also a place where people forged transnational friendships, exchanged knowledge, labor, and care (often through nonmonetary forms of reciprocity), developed informal economies, subverted legal frameworks, and found other survival strategies. De Certeau writes about how life is shaped by the countless ordinary ways people maneuver within the conditions imposed upon them, reshaping them from within. The walks emerged from a similar impulse to create counternarratives. They began as informal, semi-legal gatherings I organized via a Google spreadsheet. Walking through the ruins created a space in which archival research could be confronted with lived experience and personal memory. The tours became spaces of encounter through which knowledge could be collectively experienced and transmitted.
Quinn Slobodian, “Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism, and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany,” in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, ed. Q. Slobodian (Berghahn Books, 2015), 26.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Yale University Press, 2015), 5.
Original quote: “Wir riefen Arbeitskräfte und es kamen Menschen.” Max Frisch, “Vorwort,” in Siamo Italiani: Gespräche mit Italienischen Arbeitern in der Schweiz, ed. Alexander Seiler (EVZ, 1965), 7.
