Untitled (Everything or Nothing), 2021

While the downstairs gallery explores contemporary sonic weapons, the gallery’s upper floor presents an installation that draws on notions of belief and its relationship to labor. Tieu sheds light on the recruitment agreement that the German Democratic Republic concluded with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1980. The various objects in the show might at first glance be difficult to identify but turn out to be products made by Vietnamese contract workers in Germany. The actual objects, which don’t carry any trace of this history, were made by some of the approximately 70,000 workers, who came to the GDR between 1980 and 1989. Like the objects, these workers have been erased from the cultural and social landscape of the time. Questioning notions of faith, a lying dome made of polystyrene foam connects themes of work migration, beliefs, identity, consumerism and the construction and disappearance of nations.