Sung Tieu transforms German Pavilion into Vietnamese contract worker housing at Venice Biennale

Artist Sung Tieu has transformed the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale into a replica of a Berlin prefabricated housing block (Plattenbau) where she lived as a child, evoking the experience of Vietnamese contract workers in East Germany. The pavilion, originally built in 1909 as the Bavarian Pavilion, was remodeled in 1938 into a Nazi architectural manifesto under Hitler's approval, with trees felled, the word 'Germania' carved into the facade, and the building raised by four meters. After World War II, it was used nearly unchanged for West German contributions and has been under Italian monument protection since 1998. Christoph Schlingensief noted in 2010 that the building's past cannot be erased. Tieu's installation directly addresses the pavilion's fascist legacy by overlaying it with the history of Vietnamese labor migration, creating a layered commentary on architecture, ideology, and personal memory.