The exhibition Ruin takes its title from the term’s semantic plasticity: ruin describes not only the decay of physical structures but also gestures toward bankruptcy—whether financial, political, or moral. Phantom spaces of East German history—the vanished GDR Pavilion, the demolished Palace of the Republic, the “Sunflower House”—serve as curatorial blueprints for addressing how historical absences create zones of broken time that can be reconfigured through artistic imagination. The works presented here address not a past that has passed, but one that is perhaps even more present and tangible today.
Sung Tieu’s trompe-l'œil mosaic depicts the ruins of a prefabricated socialist housing block in Berlin, the artist’s childhood home and once a central dormitory for Vietnamese contract workers in East Germany. The mosaic also evokes the tiled façade of the “Sunflower House” in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, the site of Germany’s first post-war pogrom in 1992. By superimposing these histories onto the 1938 neoclassical façade, Tieu exposes the German Pavilion as a site of unresolved violence and invites new forms of critical remembrance while questioning national narratives.
