A new facade decorates the German pavilion at Giardini della Biennale in Venice. Three million marble tiles create a gigantic trompe-l’œil of the Gehrenstraße block of flats, a prefab housing estate in the former GDR, in Berlin-Lichtenberg, where Vietnamese contract workers and their families were accommodated in the 1990s. Once a temporary home of the artist Sung Tieu, nowadays an abandoned ruin. Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann, tragically deceased, represent the German pavilion at the 61st Biennale di Venezia, with an exhibition entitled the “Ruin.”

The point of departure for both artists are architecture and design objects as placeholders for “Gemütlichkeit” (coziness). Home here points to the former GDR and to the post-unification Germany of the 1990s but appears strangely unhomely. Curtains are pierced with metal rings, chairs are divided in half; the interior dioramas of living rooms and Bauernstuben (peasant parlors) are flattened, the walls are painted in the green color of Soviet military barracks. Naumann’s “hieroglyphs,” or possibly a system of objects in the sense of Baudrillard, signify not only nostalgic reminders of the GDR community (belts and ties with GDR symbols, depictions of pioneers, etc.) and of GDR aesthetics (reworked mural “The Mechanization of Agriculture” from 1950s). They refer to an “inner front” of the post-1989 East German experience of “Second-Hand-Re-Education” (Naumann) lead by West Germans, paired with societal uncertainties and the breakdown of economic and societal infrastructures and values. What remains is the feeling of being left behind.

The German art pavilion as well as other artistic pavilions at La Biennale di Venezia often interprets architecture by artistic means that push the boundaries and critical reception of architecture. This was the case of “Relocating Structure” by Maria Eichhorn in 2022, who excavated the remnants of the original Bavarian Giardini pavilion from 1909 and revealed the Nazi’s transformation. “Ruin,” through an artistic gesture, reveals in turn the symbolical and physical ruins of the German reunification.

hhd.