Exhibition

In Ruin, HENRIKE NAUMANN (1984, Zwickau, GDR–2026, Berlin, Germany) and SUNG TIEU (1987, Hải Dương, Vietnam) explore both the ideological ruptures and material traces of post-reunification Germany. With formal vocabularies ranging from maximalist opulence to minimalist clarity, they examine the enduring legacy of a once divided Germany and the socio-political upheavals of the 1990s transformation period and beyond.
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 “Sunflower House”—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’s trompe-l'œil mosaic depicts the ruins of a prefabricated socialist housing block in Berlin, the artist’s childhood home and once a central dormitory for Vietnamese contract workers in East Germany. The mosaic also evokes the tiled façade of the “Sunflower House” in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, the site of Germany’s first post-war pogrom in 1992. By superimposing these histories onto the 1938 neoclassical façade, Tieu exposes the German Pavilion as a site of unresolved violence and invites new forms of critical remembrance while questioning national narratives.

Henrike Naumann has painted the interior of the German Pavilion in the same mint green used in the now abandoned Soviet barracks in East Germany. By furnishing the space, she strips it of its power. Chair reliefs, injured curtains, hieroglyphs, a living room in New German Design, inspired by miniature farmhouse dioramas and a reinterpreted socialist realist mural converge to form The Home Front. Her installation traces what she described as an alternative “archaeological prehistory of the present”—for Naumann, “a story that has yet to be told within the German Pavilion.”