German Pavilion in Venice  Uncomfortable History

The Venice Biennale is regarded as the most important international exhibition of contemporary art. In the German Pavilion in 2026, Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu will make an aesthetic and political statement about Germany’s past and present with their exhibition “Ruin”. 

For decades, the Venice Art Biennale has been regarded as the world’s leading exhibition for contemporary art. Every two years, the international art scene gathers in the lagoon city to take stock of the current state of artistic practice. Both the main exhibition and the exhibits in the national pavilions aim to present the art that is most relevant at the current moment.

Ruins as a recurring theme

Kathleen Reinhardt, curator of the German Pavilion in the Giardini, has placed the 2026 exhibition – featuring works by Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu – under the ambiguous title Ruin. The term describes, on the one hand, a state of total collapse, destruction or downfall; on the other, it denotes a destructive act, or the physical remains of a derelict, partially collapsed or destroyed structure. This rather sombre tone has been deliberately set by Reinhardt and brought into dialogue with the Biennale’s overarching title In Minor Keys.

A Polyphonic Past

In the work of Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann, Reinhardt identifies overlapping formal, political, social and historical dimensions that are intended to encourage audiences to actively confront “pasts, presents and futures as polyphonic and multi-perspectival, to make space for contradictions and to engage with them critically”. Indeed, Germany’s contribution to the 2026 international exhibition takes a pointed stance on German history and the present day – aesthetically, politically and poetically.

The façade as a prefabricated building ruin

Even the first glimpse of the pavilion is striking. Sung Tieu, born in Hải Dương, Vietnam, in 1987, has given the exterior of the building the appearance of a ruin. Using around three million mosaic tiles, and after months of preparation, the structure’s façade has been temporarily “overwritten” with the image of a ruined modernist East German Plattenbau. Sung Tieu thus brings a deeply personal – as well as political – subject to Venice. As a child in the mid-1990s, she lived in this very building in East Berlin, which in the 1980s had served as accommodation for so-called “contract workers” from Vietnam.

Contract work and family history

With these workers from its socialist “brother nation”, the East German government sought to address its labour shortages. They were housed in residential facilities where their lives were strictly regulated and they lived largely isolated from the wider community. Nearly 40 years after the end of the GDR, their story remains largely untold. The artist’s father came to East Germany from Vietnam in 1987 at the age of 27 to work in a stainless steel factory in Freital, near Dresden. Sung Tieu and her mother followed in 1992, shortly after reunification. The artist also explores the entanglements of family biography, labour, politics and the intertwined histories of Germany and Vietnam inside the pavilion. In the two side galleries, a series of sculptures and installations address her mother’s biography. The works reflect on the often overlooked heroism of everyday labour, the hope for happiness and success, and the determination needed to survive the grinding reality of an unfamiliar, hostile environment.

Henrike Naumann’s legacy

Family backgrounds, labour, politics and history also play a role in the central exhibition space, which showcases works by Henrike Naumann. The Berlin-based artist passed away in February 2026, aged 41, after a short, serious illness, during the preparations for the exhibition. For this reason, her contribution can also be seen as a form of artistic legacy. Born in 1984 in Zwickau, Saxony, Naumann became known for radical installations consisting of furniture, design objects, carpets and videos.

Cosiness as a challenge

For her contribution, the artist chose to “upholster” the German Pavilion to make it feel cosy and more comfortable. She challenges its fascist architectural legacy with colourful curtains and padded wall objects. “Cosiness,” as she is quoted in the exhibition catalogue, is the “most devastating form of annihilation” for this contested exhibition space, whose 1930s architecture still breathes fascist ideology. Rather than constantly digging up the dirt and shaking our heads in shock and disbelief, Naumann proposes acknowledging that this is the normality we grew up with – the reality that shaped the country and continues to do so today. “We make the German Pavilion cosy,” she explains, “but at every turn sense that cosiness cannot exist here.”

The hidden history of art in the GDR

One of the two large-scale tableaux references a historic mural painted by Naumann’s grandfather, Karl Heinz Jakob, who worked as an artist in East Germany. In the early 1960s, Jakob produced the monumental work The Mechanisation of Agriculture for the assembly hall of the district council in Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz. Today, the work is hidden behind a wall. Through this reference, the artist points to the art history of the GDR, much of which disappeared from public space after 1990. Its symbols have hardened into enigmatic hieroglyphs, decipherable today only with great effort. And yet this past remains alive – in the long-term consequences of divided German history and the different cultural formations of East and West that, beneath the surface, continue to shape everyday life in Germany today.

Women clearing rubble, dancing vertically

On selected dates, the Venetian dance group Il Posto accompanies the exhibition with the performance Trümmerfrau (Rubble Women). Two dancers abseil down the front wall of the exhibition hall, transforming the space into a stage for their twitching, fluid movements. The 15-minute performance is set to a score spanning techno and punk through to a Brecht interpretation by the Italian singer Milva. In 1932, shortly before the Nazi seizure of power, Brecht published his cycle of poems Four Lullabies for a Proletarian Mother, reflecting a mother’s fear for her child’s future in an increasingly hostile world. That struggle for humanity feels no less urgent today. In a poetic register, the German Pavilion urges us to take this struggle seriously – and never to give up.

May 2026