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“It is up to us to defend the society in which we want to live. So that one day we will not be walking through the ruins of the government district as if through a Stonehenge of wall units.”
(Henrike Naumann, on the occasion of the exhibition “Inner Security” at the Berlin Wall Memorial of the German Bundestag, 2024)
The artist Henrike Naumann died on February 14 after a serious illness.
Born in Zwickau, the installation artist studied stage design in Dresden and scenography in Potsdam. Her artistic research focused on German reunification—with all its contradictions between identity and collective (un)consciousness. In arrangements of furniture and second-hand objects in period-specific everyday designs, she explored the connections between interior design and socio-political issues, ideologies, and power structures, uncovering an archaeology of the recently forgotten and repressed. She herself described the self-exposure of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in 2011 in her hometown of Zwickau as a key event in her artistic practice.
For documenta fifteen (2022), she developed the installation Museum of Trance together with musician Bastian Hagedorn at the invitation of the Haitian collective Atis Rezistans/Ghetto Biennale. Installed directly in front of the church organ in the gallery of St. Kunigundis, the brutal construction was reminiscent of a postmodern winged altar: Consisting of a shiny 1990s wall unit, metal organ pipes, CD shelves, and integrated speakers, it periodically emitted a menacingly vibrating sound that rumbled through the gutted nave, evoking the techno culture of the 1990s and the legendary Club Stammheim, which (until 1994 under the name Aufschwung Ost) operated in the Kulturfabrik Salzmann in Kassel Bettenhausen.
Just last year, curator Kathleen Reinhardt selected Henrike Naumann, together with Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu, to exhibit at the German Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale (May 9 to November 22, 2026). Her contribution will be realized posthumously according to her vision.
Henrike Naumann was 41 years old.
