German Pavilion at Venice Biennale Explores Ruins of GDR and Reunification

At the 61st Venice Biennale, the German Pavilion presents "Ruin," a dual exhibition by artists Sung Tieu and the late Henrike Naumann. Tieu cloaked the pavilion's facade—originally commissioned by the Nazi party in 1938—with a reconstruction of a GDR housing complex for Vietnamese contract workers, where she lived in the 1990s. The mosaic, made of over three million marble stones, references a building being demolished in Berlin. Inside, Naumann's installation "The Home Front" stages a domestic interior that contrasts East and West German design, including a reworking of a mural by her socialist realist great-grandfather and a showroom of Neue Deutsche Design. Naumann died in February 2025 at age 41 from cancer; her partner Clemens Villinger noted she arranged objects until the end. Curator Kathleen Reinhardt emphasized the formal and conceptual strengths over identity, noting the pavilion's title carries double meaning: architectural collapse in English, and moral/political decay in German. The visual identity uses graffiti-style font from the final East German pavilion in 1990. Tieu's work references Hans Haacke's 1993 intervention and shifts focus to migration, adding rather than subtracting. The exhibition runs through November 2025.