This is Germany's pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is titled “Ruin”, the exhibiting artists are Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann. Ruin / German Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2026. Venice (Italy), May 8, 2026.
Official description:
In Ruin, phantom spaces of East German history, such as the vanished GDR pavilion, the demolished Palace of the Republic and the burning Sunflower House – the site of racially motivated riots in Rostock in 1992 – serve as curatorial blueprints to address how historical gaps create “zones of broken time” that can be reconfigured through artistic resistance.
Sung Tieu envelops the pavilion’s neoclassical façade in a trompe-l’oeil mosaic. The image alludes to the ruins of a socialist-era prefabricated apartment block on Gehrenseestraße in Berlin – the artist’s childhood home and a housing complex for Vietnamese contract workers in East Germany, later inhabited by various migrant communities after reunification. Shifting from illusion to testimony, the work implicates the artist’s own biography while tracing the historical continuities of state control and surveillance regimes.
Henrike Naumann reflects on socio-political issues through interior design, exploring the friction between political opinions, taste and personal everyday aesthetics. Her immersive installation melds references to post-war Germany, the GDR pavilion, and the East German “baseball bat years” of the 1990s into an “archaeological prehistory of the present”, in which East Germany becomes an internal front, a border that will not disappear.
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