Artists

Sung Tieu, Henrike Naumann

Press release

Naumann's artistic practice reflected socio-political issues through the lens of design and interior spaces. She explored the friction between opposing political opinions through the lens of taste and personal everyday aesthetics. In her immersive installations, she arranged furniture and objects into scenographic spaces, integrating video and sound works. Her works examined the mechanisms of radicalization and their connection to personal experience. Her artistic practice was accompanied by numerous lectures and interdisciplinary collaborations that echoed the central questions of her work. Most recently, she researched the tension between art and war.

Naumann has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship, the Max Pechstein Prize of the City of Zwickau, the Leipziger Volkszeitung Art Prize and the Scholarship of Villa Aurora / Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles. Important exhibitions of her works have been held at the SculptureCenter in New York, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Wall Memorial of the German Bundestag as well as the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti (2015, 2017) and the Kyiv Biennale in Ukraine (2023). Henrike Naumann was a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Program 2024/25. She had accepted a professorship in sculpture at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg beginning in 2026. 

Henrike Naumann: "In my artistic practice, I explore how societies shape and process social and political ruptures. I use history as a tool to understand the dynamics of social change in different global contexts. In my research-based practice, I use historical sources and everyday materials to find new artistic forms of knowledge production."

Sung Tieu, born in 1987 in Hải Dương, Vietnam, is a Vietnamese-German artist who lives and works in Berlin. Having grown up between political systems, Tieu’s work unfolds at the intersections of biography and geopolitics. Her practice examines the enduring aftershocks of the Cold War, colonial entanglements, and the subtle mechanisms of institutional power. It reflects the social and psychological effects of migration, bureaucracy, and control. Through sculpture, found objects, sound, video, photography, text, and archival material, Tieu constructs spatially dense installations  – environments in which political structures and personal experience converge and blur. 

Major solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen; Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Amant Foundation, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Kunst Museum Winterthur; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.); Mudam – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK), Leipzig; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Nottingham Contemporary. She has also participated in the Gwangju Biennale (2024), Shanghai Biennale (2023), Bienal de São Paulo (2021), and Kyiv Biennale (2021), among others. Tieu has received numerous awards, including the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2024), the Rubens Promotional Award of the City of Siegen (2024), and the Audience Award of the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2021). She is currently a substitute professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg.

Sung Tieu: "I am interested in the edges of institutional language – between what is articulated and what is left unsaid. It is within the interstices of material form and discursive structure, between articulation and omission, that works emerge – resisting fixed interpretation and inviting viewers to locate their own position."