German Pavilion designed as a prefabricated apartment block
The German Pavilion in Venice has been completed despite the sudden death of artist Henrike Naumann. What now lies behind millions of mosaic tiles.
Venice (dpa) – This year, the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is being transformed externally into a prefabricated apartment block. “It aligns with what we expect to be a highly political Biennale,” said curator Kathleen Reinhardt. The design is by artists Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann. Naumann died unexpectedly from cancer in February at the age of 41.
Reinhardt said that, with these two artists, East German and East German-migrant voices were being represented in the pavilion for the first time with this level of depth and vehemence. Tieu is covering the 1938 building – “the fascist architecture that so many people have already grappled with” – with the image of a Berlin prefabricated apartment block in which she lived as a child in the 1990s. She is using more than three million mosaic tiles for the project.
Before reunification, the building on Gehrenseestrasse was one of the largest residential complexes for Vietnamese contract workers, and it also came to be seen as a ghetto after reunification. It is part of the gentrification history of Berlin, too: the ruins changed hands several times and attracted investors.
