A

فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg is happy to announce the first solo exhibition of Sung Tieu. We started representing her in 2020 and her work had been exhibited for the first time in our Hamburg space in 2017, in the framework of Neue Kunst in Hamburg’s travel scholarship.

Everything or Nothing starts on the ground floor of the gallery with the artist’s new video Moving Target Shadow Detection (2022). Commissioned by Forma and Frieze, it investigates the mysterious illness known as the Havana Syndrome. In 2016, U.S. State officials stationed in Cuba were the first to be diagnosed with the syndrome, which encompasses ailments such as headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, nausea or visual disturbances, with unclear causes. Intelligence services suspected attacks with powerful electromagnetic waves to be behind the reported health problems, with some theories suggesting sonic or acoustic weapons attacks.

Given her interest in inconspicuous surveillance systems, and new war technologies, her film goes back to where it all began: a room at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, where the first instance of Havana Syndrome was reported. The video reconstructs meticulously all details as a 3D animation. Surveillance cameras and Nano drone footage draw a path from the hotel lobby to a room, occupied by a member of the CIA, where viewers hear news reports about recent Havana Syndrome attacks around the world.

In the interest of her research on acoustic and psychological warfare, Tieu exposed herself to a reconstruction of the Havana Syndrome, which she found in court hearings, while scanning her own brain through MRI. These brain images become small-scale works analyzing the effects of such sonic weapons, which often remain undetected and unnoticed.

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.