‘It was like a popcorn moment for us – it was all the media could focus on,’ says Kathleen Reinhardt, curator of the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, recalling the reaction to the press release announcing the artists for Germany’s national participation. Despite the press material deliberately avoiding any mention of East Germany or the German Democratic Republic (GDR), coverage focused almost entirely on the fact that the artists, Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann, as well as Reinhardt herself, grew up in the former East. ‘They completely reduced it to an identity discourse,’ she says. ‘Although both artists speak from an East German position, their work moves across more universal concerns.’

Titled ‘Ruin’, the exhibition works through the pavilion’s fascist architecture – the result of its 1938 redesign by the National Socialists – to bring into view histories the pavilion has long excluded. ‘It was important for me to bring in Sung and Henrike’s position, which is tied to the realities of a neo-Nazi present,’ says Reinhardt. In the postwar era, projects in the pavilion tended to approach the building from a West German perspective, treating Nazism as something to be acknowledged at a distance. ‘But for those who grew up in East Germany, Nazism wasn’t distant but a hard truth that was part of everyday life. Despite the GDR’s official anti-fascist stance, far-right ideologies often went unaddressed.’

Tieu, the daughter of Vietnamese contract workers, has enveloped the pavilion’s exterior in more than 3 million marble stones – a 1:1 mosaic skin derived from the façade of the Gehrenseestraße housing complex where she lived with her mother in the 1990s. ‘I’m literally rebuilding my home on top of the pavilion,’ she says. Even the carved inscription ‘GERMANIA’ over the pavilion’s portico – a remnant of the building’s Nazi past – has been covered by the graffiti-strewn exterior of the Gehrenseestraße complex. ‘On the façade, you go from one floor to three,’ says Tieu. ‘That immediately creates a different relationship to the body. It’s small, and those proportions come directly from the living conditions I had there with my mother. There were three of us living in one dormitory room.’

The work stands in contrast to previous exhibitions that have intervened in the building’s structure, notably Hans Haacke’s shattering of the marble floor in 1993. ‘I’m not stripping something away, I’m confronting it with a totally different site,’ says Tieu. Around 60,000 Vietnamese contract workers were brought to East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s; after Germany’s unification, many were pushed into precarious conditions as the state attempted to send them back to Asia. ‘These workers helped build the GDR and were then disposed of when it collapsed. It wasn’t until 1997 that they received the same rights as Gastarbeiter [guest workers] in West Germany – and even then, not as migrants, but through equal rights between East and West.’

Through the curtained windows of Tieu’s mosaic cladding glows the lurid tones of Naumann’s immersive, multipart installation. The luminous green interior recalls the painted walls of abandoned Soviet barracks in East Germany. On one side of the room, Naumann has reworked a Socialist Realist mural painted by her grandfather in Chemnitz, then Karl-Marx-Stadt, in the 1960s. ‘He was part of the first generation of the GDR,’ Reinhardt explains, ‘still fully invested in the socialist project.’ On the opposite side, she presents a 3D relief of a living room, furnished in the irreverent idiom of Neues Deutsches Design – ‘the last real German design movement,’ adds Reinhardt. But instead of zigzags of vibrant color, there are only grays and blacks. The bed in the corner is so austere it would not be out of place in a prison. ‘No matter how homey you attempt to be in the German pavilion,’ says Reinhardt of Naumann’s installation, ‘it always stays a hostile place.’

While conceptualizing and preparing the pavilion, Naumann, aged 41, received a terminal cancer diagnosis and passed away not long after, in February this year. ‘As soon as she got the diagnosis, she was determined to finish the work,’ says Reinhardt. ‘We’re really proud that we can present it,’ adds Tieu, who, like Reinhardt, saw completing what she had begun as a way of holding things together. ‘But it’s heartbreaking,’ says Reinhardt, ‘because this installation marks a further development in her work, and she won’t see it.’

Growing up in Zwickau, Saxony, in the 1990s – a city later associated with the right-wing terrorist group the National Socialist Underground – Naumann encountered extreme-right ideologies embedded in youth culture, currents that continue through to the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Near the entrance, a hieroglyphic system indexes a wall of objects – a black articulated lamp, an ax, a political bust – meticulously arranged like archaeological remnants of East and West German histories. Naumann’s work shows how domestic objects carry a past that continues to shape the present. ‘She draws on pop-cultural references that might seem superficial,’ says Reinhardt, ‘yet speak directly to a disillusioned now.’

Since 2023, Tieu has been giving tours through the Gehrenseestraße complex, documenting her home and keeping stories of her community in circulation. But in 2024, she discovered that the building was facing demolition, part of a longer pattern of erasure, from residential housing blocks to the contentious dismantling of the Palast der Republik, the former East German parliament building used for impromptu parties and exhibitions after the Berlin Wall fell. ‘It’s schizophrenic,’ Tieu says of Germany’s relationship with the former East. ‘On the one hand there’s nostalgia and romanticization, and on the other, total neglect.’

Inside the outer wings of the pavilion, Tieu has placed a silhouette of her mother, constructed from parallel aluminum bars, scaled according to Albrecht Dürer’s system of human proportions – the body reduced to a fixed, measured, and categorized form. Her mother, who developed chronic illness after years in an industrial laundry, was forced to sell cigarettes, shut out of legal employment by discriminatory labor laws. In the opposite wing, an infestation of candy ladybugs – their chocolate centers replaced with wood beneath the foil – turns a common symbol of luck into a bitter reflection on the perception of foreigners.

‘The story of GDR contract workers is central to the work,’ Tieu continues, ‘but there’s a risk of being framed too narrowly, as if the pavilion can be neatly labeled a “GDR project” for one edition before everyone moves on.’ Her concerns come as institutions begin to confront the legacies of reunification, and a generation shaped by it speaks more openly about these histories. In this context, the work marks a rare moment in which a non-white East German narrative is presented in the pavilion. And though East German artists have appeared in the German pavilion in earlier Biennale editions, ‘they’re always men of a certain generation, in group shows,’ says Reinhardt, ‘who weren’t even engaging with these histories.’

‘The pavilion goes against what people have come to expect of German contemporary discourse,’ Reinhardt continues. ‘The artists have been working through these questions long before they were asked to represent German art – with work that cuts directly into the present: the right-wing backlash, the resurgence of anti-feminist politics. And it needs to be spoken about critically,’ she says. ‘After all, these artists, and these realities, have been here all along.’