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In her work for the 2026 Venice Biennale, Sung Tieu’s mosaic trompe-l’œil of the GDR Plattenbau building on Gehrenseestraße in Berlin-Lichtenberg, is set atop the German Pavilion’s monumental, fascist, National Socialist-built exterior. Here, it collapses and stretches scale–from façade to fragment, architecture to human body, collective history to individual experience. At this closing event, Monica Juneja and Quinn Slobodian unpack the art historical and political histories that shape Tieu’s work, tracing entanglements of global labour, migration, and state power between Europe and Asia, from the Cold War to the present. The event is opened by Mi You and Kathleen Reinhardt, and concludes with a conversation between the speakers and the artist, moderated by Eva Bentcheva.

This event is co-organised by Eva Bentcheva, Maria Reiche Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chair of Visual Studies and Art History of TUD Dresden University of Technology, co-financed by tax funds using the budget approved by the Landtag of the Free State of Saxony and funded by the Federal and State Program for Women Professors (Professorinnenprogramm). The event is supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and the Berggruen Institute.

Location and Registration

19 November 2026, 6.30 pm
Berggruen Institute, Casa Tre Oci, Fondamenta de Le Zitelle Giudecca 43, Guidecca, Venice
Capacity is limited, rsvp with sophie.slade@ifa.de

Description

The event is opened by Mi You and Kathleen Reinhardt. Monica Juneja’s contribution will critically examine image and surface in the art of Sung Tieu, while Quinn Slobodian will address the forgotten history of East Germany and the Global South. Sung Tieu and Eva Bentcheva will enter into dialogue with Juneja and Slobodian following their presentations.

Participants

Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator with a focus on transcultural art histories between Europe and South/Southeast Asia. She is currently the Maria Reiche Postdoctoral Fellow with the Chair of Visual Studies and Art History at the TUD Dresden University of Technology. She has previously held research and curatorial positions at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Tate Research Centre: Asia in London, and has had academic positions at Heidelberg University, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University) and SOAS, University of London. She is the Managing Editor of the open-access book series, Worlding Public Cultures published by ICI Berlin Press.

Monica Juneja is Senior Professor of Art History at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Shiv Nadar University, India. She has written extensively on transculturation and visual representation, as well as heritage and architectural histories. Her latest book Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (2023), received the Opus Magnum award of the Volkswagen Foundation. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Meyer-Struckmann Prize awarded for excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the 2024 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award of the CAA.

Kathleen Reinhardt is the director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin since 2022. The museum, where she presented exhibitions by Lin May Saeed, Noa Eshkol, and Gisèle Vienne and commissioned new works by Ayumi Paul and David Hartt, has been awarded as Museum of the Year 2025 by AICA Germany. In 2026 she is the curator of the German Pavillon at the 61st Venice Biennale presenting Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu. From 2016–2022, she was curator for contemporary art at the Albertinum (Dresden State Art Collections). Reinhardt earned her Ph.D. in African American art and socially engaged artistic practices at FU Berlin, she teaches internationally and publishes regularly in exhibition catalogues, academic anthologies, and scholarly journals.

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. He is the author with Ben Tarnoff of Muskism, selected by The New Yorker, Financial Times, and The Economist as one of the Best Books of 2026 so far. Other books include Globalists, Crack-Up Capitalism, and Hayek’s Bastards. The last won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. He has written for New York Times, New York Review of Books, Financial Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and more. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has also been a fellow at Chatham House, Harvard, and FU Berlin.

Sung Tieu is an artist based between Berlin and Copenhagen, where she is a guest teacher at the Royal Danish Academy. Raised between political systems, Tieu’s work unfolds at the intersection of biography and geopolitics. Working across sculpture, found objects, photography, archival material, drawing, and scent, she examines how political, economic, and administrative systems inscribe themselves onto bodies, spaces, and forms of perception, tracing their historical formation and contemporary afterlives. Current exhibitions include How is your day? at Emalin, London (2026); Inserzioni at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2026) and Ruin at the German Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2026). Recent group exhibitions include the 82nd Whitney Biennial, New York (2026); Call me gravity at WIELS, Brussels (2026) and the 14th Taipei Biennial (2025).

Mi You is a curator and professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel / documenta Institut, and co-director of the Käte Hamburger research center Resource Worlds. She’s the author of the book Art in a Multipolar World (Hatje Cantz, 2024). In her role as a theorist, curator, institution builder and advisor, she works on geopolitical, geophilosophical and political economical layers of the arts. Her curated exhibitions include the Shanghai Biennale (2020–21), Lonely Vectors at the Singapore Art Museum (2022), Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis at Framer Framed (2024), and The China Moment at Kasseler Kunstverein (2026). She is a member of the transnational NGO Common Action Forum and a Berggruen Institute Europe fellow.

In February 2026, the artist Henrike Naumann passed away just a few months before her work Die Innere Front–The Home Front opened in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. For the closing event, Matteo Bertelé (art historian), Kathleen Reinhardt (curator), Vasyl Cherepanyn (curator), Juliane Rebentisch (philosopher), and Clemens Villinger (historian) discuss the life and work of Henrike Naumann. Together, they will commemorate an artist who explored the politics and aesthetics of everyday life and examine the themes, conceptual frameworks, and working methods that shaped her work. At the same time, the discussion will focus on how her artistic practice points toward the future.

The event is a collaboration between the German Pavilion 2026 and the Center for Studies in Russian, Central Asian, and Caucasian Art at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The event is organized under the auspices of the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation and supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.

Location and Registration

20 November 2026, 6.30 pm
Aula Baratto, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dorsoduro 3246, Venice
The event is currently fully booked, please register for our waitlist with sophie.slade@ifa.de

Participants

Matteo Bertelé is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is the deputy director of the Centre for Studies in Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian Art, executive director of the Summer School Contemporary art and curatorship: from documenta to the Biennale and co-director of the academic journal Venezia Arti. He is currently researcher within the project On the Eve of Revolution. The East German Artist in the 1980s at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He authored the books: Arte sovietica alla Biennale di Venezia (1924-1962) and Enrico Crispolti e l’arte russa e sovietica contemporanea in Italia (1956-1990).

Vasyl Cherepanyn was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, and currently lives in Berlin. He is the co-founder and head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), a platform for collaboration among academic, artistic, and political communities. VCRC organizes the Kyiv Biennial and is a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance (EEBA). Cherepanyn is part of the curatorial team of the Kyiv Biennial, which was presented in 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv, and Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, and in 2026 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. In addition to his curatorial work, he teaches at various international universities in Europe. He holds a PhD in philosophy and is also a writer and editor. Vasyl Cherepanyn is the curator of the 14th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which will take place from June through September 2027.

Juliane Rebentisch is Professor of Philosophy at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. She is a Regular Visiting Professor at the German Department of Princeton University and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. From 2015 to 2018 she was President of the German Society for Aesthetics. In 2017, she was awarded the Lessing Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Her publications include Aesthetics of Installation Art (Sternberg 2012); The Art of Freedom. On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence (Polity 2016); The Ecological Uncanny (Materialverlag HFBK Hamburg 2024).

Kathleen Reinhardt is the director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin since 2022. The museum, where she presented exhibitions by Lin May Saeed, Noa Eshkol, and Gisèle Vienne and commissioned new works by Ayumi Paul and David Hartt, has been awarded as Museum of the Year 2025 by AICA Germany. In 2026 she is the curator of the German Pavillon at the 61st Venice Biennale presenting Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu. From 2016–2022, she was curator for contemporary art at the Albertinum (Dresden State Art Collections). Reinhardt earned her Ph.D. in African American art and socially engaged artistic practices at FU Berlin, she teaches internationally and publishes regularly in exhibition catalogues, academic anthologies, and scholarly journals.

Clemens Villinger is a historian at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner. His research focuses on the history of the GDR, the German-German transformation after 1989/90, and the history of knowledge and everyday life with regard to notions of normality in the twentieth century. His work combines perspectives from social, cultural, and intellectual history. Since 2008, he has collaborated with Henrike Naumann on numerous exhibitions, publications, and artistic projects. In 2026, he served as Deputy Artistic Director of her contribution Die Innere Front–The Home Front at the German Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale.