A Pavilion of Ruins: Germany Reconsiders Its Past in Venice

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) may have collapsed in 1990, but its physical effects are on display at this year’s Venice Biennale, where a reconstruction of a communist housing complex by artist Sung Tieu has cloaked the facade of the German Pavilion. Covering the underlying fascist architecture, commissioned by the Nazi party in 1938, the monumental work suggests how easily one regime can be supplanted by another. 

Inside the pavilion, an immersive installation by the late Henrike Naumann moves us from the exterior to within the domestic realm, staging a confrontation between personal and political, and between East and West. 

Naumann’s sudden death earlier this year inevitably adds an additional layer to the presentation. The artist died in February, age 41, from “a cancer diagnosis that came far too late,” her partner Clemens Villinger wrote in a public statement, noting that “until the very end, she arranged objects to produce and implement her heartfelt project, the German Pavilion,” an exhibition realized “in the same way her career began: as a Gemeinschaftswerk, a collaborative effort, guided by Henrike’s artistic vision.”

Public Versus Private

Tieu’s reference for the pavilion’s exterior is one of the GDR’s largest housing estates for Vietnamese contract workers, where she lived with her mother in the 1990s after arriving in Germany as an asylum seeker; her father had come to East Germany as a contract worker in 1987. Composed of more than three million marble mosaic stones, the work presents a pixelated image of the complex. “I decided to do that as a mosaic because it connects to Italy as a site and to its heritage, but I’m doing something very different with it,” the artist said.

There is a strange synchronicity to the pavilion’s unveiling: The original building on which the facade is based is being demolished in Berlin. “It’s being torn down as I talk about it with you,” Tieu said when we spoke in March, ahead of the Biennale’s opening this week. It gives the exhibition’s title, “Ruin,” extra punch.

The central room is devoted to an installation by Naumann, working in her signature medium, furniture. If Tieu recreates the exterior of a home, Naumann takes us within the intimate realm of the domestic interior. The transition stages a confrontation between the politics of East and West.

Naumann shows—and unsettles—the ways in which political beliefs find form within the private spaces of daily life. The space includes a reworking of a mural by Naumann’s great-grandfather, a socialist realist painter in the GDR, now “in a very different format, with different materials,” exhibition curator Kathleen Reinhardt said. It is also a comment about the different languages of art that the GDR and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) chose after World War II, she said, “one pertaining to free abstraction and the other to figuration rooted in socialist realism.”

The late artist contrasts this with a showroom-style presentation of Neue Deutsche Design, the last West German design movement before reunification, which Reinhardt calls an “anti-design” moment. The tableau plays out against a mint-green backdrop, which Naumann chose to echo the color of Soviet army barracks. “For me, this is highly visionary,” Reinhardt said, noting how Naumann chose this color both before her death and before Russia’s controversial participation in this year’s Biennale was confirmed. “It’s Henrike saying, ‘No, this is not over. We are looking at the ruins, but we are still looking at the remnants of what this means,’” Reinhardt said.

Naumann had been thinking of the Venice presentation for a long time, and had finalized the concept for her work before her death. Reinhardt said it was “always in the back of her head—something that she would love to do at some point, this big challenge that she was always carrying with her.”

Concept Over Identity

The pavilion’s title, “Ruin,” carries a double meaning. In English, it suggests architectural collapse, Reinhardt said, while the German ruine extends to moral, political, financial, and physical decay. The visual identity reinforces this, using the same graffiti-style font as the final East German pavilion in 1990. Naumann had closely studied postwar negotiations over control of the pavilion, Reinhardt said, “pertaining to who gets the pavilion—who wants a representation in this soft power game of the Venice Biennale.” Given the fraught conversations around national representation at this year’s Biennale, the question feels less historical than cyclical. 

Together, the artists invoke the moment of reunification to show the afterlives of ideologies and how politics move through the spaces of our home lives, whether through architecture, art, or design. “Obviously, Henrike is working on furniture on the inside, where identity formation and ideologies are discussed,” Reinhardt said. “It’s a space that is very private while at the same time, it is very political—the home. On the other hand you have Sung searching for a home where no home was granted to her.”

The work is rooted in recent German history, but to focus on the identity of these artists would be “reductive,” according to Reinhardt, who has been skeptical of how the national German press has talked about the pavilion before the opening. “The only topic was there are three women from East Germany doing this,” she said. “It was not about the art.” She instead talked about the formal and conceptual strengths of each artist, and described “a very stark visual contrast between this maximalism and this opulence that Henrike always pulls into her installations, and this highly minimalist approach that Sung brings.” 

History, Reframed

Tieu’s intervention draws on a history that is both personal and structural. “Reunification is often portrayed as a moment of unity,” she said. “But for contract workers of the GDR, it was the most precarious time. They were left behind by three nationalities: the GDR, the FRG, and Vietnam. Nobody knew what to do with them and nobody wanted anything to do with them.” 

A New York Times article from 1995 referred to the housing projects as Germany’s failed version of the American Dream, but Tieu remembers them differently: “That’s why we moved there: because the Vietnamese community would support itself, since they wouldn’t receive any other support.”

Her work also references one of the great German pavilions of the past: Hans Haacke’s 1993 intervention in which he smashed to rubble the marble floor that had been installed by the Nazis in 1938, installing the word “Germania” above the doorway in reference to Hitler’s name for the planned capital of the Third Reich, a rebuilt Berlin. Less well known is that Haacke’s work was in part a response to racist pogroms the previous year in the East German port city of Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where a neo-Nazi mob attacked a housing complex of Vietnamese contract workers while locals applauded. 

Tieu is shifting the framework for discussions of German history. “It’s a difficult task to work with the German pavilion,” she said. “I’m not a straightforward German artist in the way that I don’t feel the need to deconstruct the building once again. The Nazi past is not necessarily directly my past.” Instead, she wanted to “tell the story from the other side,” as someone who lived in those buildings and experienced far-right violence and racism. “I wanted to bring it to the pavilion as a ruin, as a broken site—not as a site of idealized socialist housing.”

Where Haacke’s gesture was one of rupture, Tieu’s is one of layering. “It’s an addition instead of subtraction or removal or destruction.” she said. “Mine is a story of migration, and I’m adding something to Germany.” Despite the ruins political systems leave behind, both artists insist creativity will out.