Not a Relic of the Past:
Ruin

Founded in 1895, the Venice Biennale is widely regarded as the world's oldest international art exhibition now reaching its 61st edition in 2026. With roughly ninety participating countries, this year's exhibition took the theme of In Minor Keys, declaring an intent to advance voices marginalized by the dominant narratives. But the curator behind this vision, Koyo Kouoh, passed away a year before the opening. Cameroonian-born, she would have been the first-ever female African curator in the history of the Biennale. Mourning cast a double shadow over the German Pavilion after participating artist Henrike Naumann unexpectedly died in February of 2026, just three months before the opening. Featuring two posthumous bodies of work, this year's Biennale opened with an acute awareness of these losses. 

At the height of a Venetian summer, the vaporetto [water bus] cuts through the water to arrive at the Giardini pier, where the density of the city begins to slowly lighten. Through the trees in the park, the rooftops of the national pavilions emerge one by one, and of these, the large, weighty form of the German Pavilion is visible even from afar. Drawing closer to the exhibition hall, hundreds of thousands of small tiles covering the exterior walls form a dense mosaic. Step back a few paces, and the small pixels of individual tiles converge into a single image resembling the stained, weathered facade of an old apartment block.

This year's exhibition at the German Pavilion, Ruin, was curated by Kathleen Reinhardt and features two artists, Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu. Naumann was born in Zwickau in former East Germany and had long been exploring its political radicalization and history through furniture and interior design. Tieu was born in Hải Dương, Vietnam, and raised in Germany; her work traces how state systems classify and exclude bodies. Both artists' work is tied to East Germany, yet each cross the same territory from a different angle.

Other Histories on the Facade

Sung Tieu began by covering the exterior of the German Pavilion with more than three million marble mosaic tiles, recreating the housing complex on Gehrenseestraße in Berlin's Lichtenberg district. The work's title, Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable (2026), is drawn from the opening line of Article 1 of the German Basic Law. By inscribing the phrase onto a building renovated by the Nazi party, the piece therefore announces the exhibition's central concern. Indeed, of all the national pavilions in the Giardini, none carries the weight of controversy as heavily in its very architecture as the German Pavilion.

Designed in 1909 in a neoclassical style, it was originally known as the Bavarian, or Munich, Pavilion, before the Nazi party rebuilt it entirely in 1938 as an exercise in fascist architecture. That a building remodeled under Hitler's rule continues, to this day, to represent Germany on the world stage poses a question to every artist who exhibits within it: showing something within this building will, inevitably, leads to confronting its history in some form. This follows the same reasoning that saw Hans Haacke, in 1993, tear up the pavilion's marble floor to expose the cracked concrete beneath, turning the space itself into an object of historical critique; and the performance of Anne Imhof's Faust, in 2017, for which she installed a glass structure on and beneath which she positioned the play’s performers, eventually winning the Golden Lion.

But unlike earlier artists who spoke to the building's history by dismantling or emptying it, deducting something from it, Sung Tieu takes the opposite strategy: one of accumulation. Born in Vietnam in 1987, the artist emigrated to Germany with her mother in 1992, the very first place she moved into in her life in Berlin was in one of these Plattenbau housing complex blocks on Gehrenseestraße. It was built by East Germany to house contract laborers from Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, and Cuba, affording occupants fewer than five square meters per person, four to a room. East Germany had officially espoused socialist international solidarity, but the reality was poles apart: workers were kept segregated far from city centers, contact with German citizens was restricted, and once their contracts expired, they were forced to leave the country.

In the corridor of the building where the artist lived as a child, protective netting had been installed, put up after neo-Nazis threw firebombs through the windows. Since 2003 the complex has been under an eviction order, and demolition continues to this day. Tieu has brought this building to Venice. The mosaic's individual tiles were fabricated near Ravenna, following Venice's traditional mosaic technique, but instead of the usual gilded saints or Greek myths, the facade of an immigrant dormitory now fills the space. Inside the exhibition hall, Tieu's work moves from architecture to body, from collective history to family history. Two works speak to this directly: But the Flesh Is Weak (2026), of the artist's mother's hands and feet cast in glass, and Divers Weights and Divers Measures (Vũ Thị Hạnh / F I) (2026), tracing her mother's bodily contours in aluminum bars based on Albrecht Dürer's 1528 studies of human proportion.

Dürer's studies were a Renaissance attempt to mathematically measure the human body and define ideal proportion; the artist records her own mother's body in that very language of measurement. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Neck & Wrist Circumference, Version 4) (2026) draws even more directly on the logic of phrenology, a pseudoscience emerging in the nineteenth century claiming that the shape and size of the skull could reveal intelligence or racial superiority. Today the theory has been entirely discredited as stemming from groundless racist tropes, but at the time was widely used as a tool to objectively justify colonial rule and racial discrimination.

Power does not operate by exclusion alone. It operates through systems that classify, evaluate, and define. And the mechanisms that push certain bodies outside the norm have always borrowed the language of measurement. The artist's mother emigrated to Germany and lived in an immigrant dormitory, a body that could be deported once her contract ended, merely one of countless other migrant bodies that the state system sorted and processed. What the state needed was only her labor; it never imagined the person who inhabited that body as a functioning member of society. By bringing her mother's body directly into that same framework — once an instrument of exclusion — the artist installs, at the very center of the institution, a witness to a being it had only ever treated as an object to be processed.

In They Have Eyes, But They See Not, They Have Ears, But They Hear Not (2026), sculpted ladybugs sit on the walls. In German-speaking countries, the ladybug is a symbol of good luck. Yet that same image also carries the weight of a history of linguistic violence, one that has long made use of the simile of immigrants as vermin. Luck and disgust coexist within a single image. "Human dignity shall be inviolable," a declaration that should self-evidently apply to everyone, is quietly interrogated, within the exhibition, through the stories of those it has historically excluded.

The Politics of Taste

The first thing that catches one’s gaze when entering the German Pavilion is a wall painted, at monumental scale, in mint green, the color once common in Soviet army barracks and public buildings across former East Germany. Henrike Naumann covered the interior of the exhibition space in that same hue. Against this backdrop, she installed miniature farmhouse crafts, curtains pierced with bullet holes, damaged display cabinets, keys, and decorative weapons. Naumann likened these objects to "hieroglyphs," the ancient Egyptian pictographs. Each object points to a specific moment in modern German history, yet without that context, they read as nothing more than old belongings. Naumann's strategy was not to confront head-on the violence these objects carry, but the opposite: a paradoxical strategy of making the space "cozy", arranging the debris of modern German history as naturally as if it were everyday clutter left in a living room. The effect is a visceral experience of the proposition that violence does not only erupt as an exceptional event, but is reproduced and sustained within the most comfortable of spaces.

On another wall hangs an abstract version of a socialist-realist mural painted by the artist's maternal grandfather around 1960. Her grandfather, Karl Heinz Jakob, was reprimanded by the Party at the time for failing to render the workers' faces happy enough. Those faces were less individual likenesses than surfaces onto which a collective expression had been allocated, the contours of a power that demanded the emotion ideology required. Naumann erased those faces entirely from this piece. Since graduating from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Naumann's abiding interest had been in how taste transmits ideology. Specifically, she had continually examined how everyday interior design in East Germany in turn shaped the materialization of socialist collectivity, and how, after reunification, that same domestic space became a breeding ground for far-right sentiment.

For her, the 1990s were not merely a historical backdrop but, in her own words, an "archaeological prehistory" of the Germany we know today. The sofas, cabinets, and curtains of that era, are media that shaped and circulated a particular political sensibility. [1]

This exhibition also marks a formal turning point in her work: departing from the three-dimensional spatial installations she had largely shown before, the work here flattens into wall reliefs. This shift, from summoning an entire interior of a particular era to converting it into an abstract system of signs, carries within it a critique of the way East German history was absorbed, singularly, into the West German narrative: the complex, three-dimensional lives of East German citizens flattened into a narrative of failure.

It is in this context that the artist spoke of a concept she called "Secondhand-Re-Education." After 1989, the West declared the collapse of socialism to be the completion of history, and East Germans were positioned within that sequence of events as subjects in need of re-education. The objects in this exhibition read almost as an inventory of the debris left behind by that process: discarded, absorbed, or twisted along the way.

"It will come back, this time, in a way far more sophisticated than the Stasi ever was." In 1991, shortly after reunification, East German civil-rights activist Bärbel Bohley warned that the logic of Stasi-style surveillance, exclusion, and enforced silence would inevitably return. Thirty-five years later, her words settle over the German Pavilion like a prophecy. [2]

The Ruin named in the exhibition title does not simply describe the site of a collapsed building. What Tieu gathers beside segregated bodies, and what Naumann uncovers within the grammar of taste, are both, in the end, an unfinished collapse still in progress; one that has been continuing on through to this very moment.

Walking on toward the next pavilion, I turned back once more to look at the German Pavilion. The image on the facade came into sharper focus. The once-hazy outline of an old apartment building's exterior now resolved, fully, into a single, massive housing complex — a collective made up of hundreds of thousands of tiles, no two alike. Perhaps this is how what Bohley spoke of has returned after all. Too close, and entirely natural.


Text: Eunji Park
Concept: Sohee Shin
English Translation: STAR Korea AG
German Translation: Leslie Klatte