"In 2019, the artist Henrike Naumann built an East German living room and rotated it by 90 degrees. The sofa, chairs and coffee table all in the unmistakable aesthetic of the 1990s climbed the wall. The carpet became vertical. Cabinets hovered near the floor alongside a CD rack, baseball badges and a flag bearing a slogan in Sutterlin script: Beware of storm and wind and East Germans who are enraged."
"Few artists examined the emotional infrastructure of German reunification and its global resonances with such power and clarity as Henrike Naumann, treating design history as social history and redefining what political art could look like. This weekend, on 14 February, she died at the age of 41, after a cancer diagnosis that came too late. In just a few months, the world will see her work at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale,"
Henrike Naumann created installations that made the emotional consequences of German reunification physically tangible, notably a 2019 East German living-room rotated on its side titled Ostalgie. The installation relocated familiar 1990s furniture and objects into unsettling spatial configurations, evoking loss and rupture after the collapse of the GDR. Naumann treated design history as social history and investigated the emotional infrastructure and global resonances of reunification. Born in Zwickau in 1984, she emerged as a leading millennial East German artist with international recognition. She died on 14 February at 41 following a late cancer diagnosis, leaving a German pavilion at Venice conceived with Sung Tieu.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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