June 2018
Lecture Series 2023 – 2024 I – What comes after Postmodernism?Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, 2023 ᵉⁿLink to the English version of the lecture.ᵈᵉLink zur deutschen Version der Lecture. II – Foreign AgentTbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum, Georgia, 2024 ᵉⁿLink to the English version of the lecture.ᵈᵉAnleitung zur Einblendung deutscher Untertitel. III – BreatheScreening and conversation with Vasyl […]
June 2018
12. Juni – 29. September 2024Mauer-Mahnmal im Deutschen Bundestag This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz). The Art Advisory Council of the German Bundestag has invited the artist Henrike Naumann to create an exhibition at the Wall Memorial in the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus based on the Basic Law in its first version from […]
June 2018
Kyiv Biennial 2023Drama Theater Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine Press New York Times on the Kyiv Biennial „the most energizing exhibizion of the year“ Süddeutsche Zeitung zur Kyiv Biennale„Ausstellung des Jahres“ Monopol Top 10022 – Henrike Naumann Interview Postimpreza RBB Kultur – Das GesprächHenrike Naumann – Kunst in konfliktreichen Zeiten Infos Drum machine man – SI_ProcessVolodymyr – Viktor AbramiykEstragon […]
June 2018
22. September 2022 – 27. Februar 2023SculptureCenter, New York SculptureCenter is pleased to announce Henrike Naumann: Re-Education, the first exhibition in the United States by Berlin-based artist Henrike Naumann. Naumann’s installations of furniture and design objects are composed as scenes that ask pressing and enduring questions: What is the relationship between design and ideology? How […]
June 2018
In 2015, artists Bastian Hagedorn and Henrike Naumann opened the Museum of Trance in Portau-Prince in which they exorcised German rave culture and museumized it as ‘other’ in the midst of Haiti. The new multimedia continues these reflections on spirituality, rave culture, exoticism and otherness.
June 2018
22. April – 27. August 2023Ludwigforum Aachen Identity is unattainable. As banal as it may sound, the dissolution of difference that it designates is violent. The word reunification, for instance, is widely used, and yet the prefix “re” suggests an identity between the GDR’s accession to the Federal Republic of Germany in October 1990, and […]
June 2018
Naumann takes the millenium changeover year as a starting point for a look at the 1990s in East and West Germany and the after-effects of postmodern design on German society. Based on her reflections, the Abteiberg Museum’s large, temporary exhibition space is transformed into a curious “German Pavilion”—an excavation site in which the ruins of postmodernism and German unification are exposed. The exhibition occupies the space between museum, trade fair stand, concept store, living room and ruin.
September 2019
Galerie im Turm Berlin, 2018 Kunstsammlungen Zwickau, 2019Kunstraum Potsdam, 2020 The exhibition DDR Noir: Schichtwechsel stages an encounter between socialist realism and postmodern design. Drawing on the example of the work of Karl Heinz Jakob (*1929, †1997, Zwickau), the grandfather of the artist, Naumann investigates society‘s relationship with art from the former GDR. In the […]
November 2019
Ruinenwert refers to the architecture of Hitler‘s Berghof residence on Obersalzberg which, like the former ‚Haus der Deutschen Kunst‘ (‚House of German Art‘), was a representative building designed by Gerdy Troost for the National Socialists.
November 2019
Das Reich is a dystopian space somewhere between a provisional imperial seat of government and a place of worship similar to the Stonehenge. Visitors physically enter into a world view, in which nationalist conspiracy theories connect to personal fates and the fractures in German history.
December 2019
This video work is a very personal approach to dealing with the fascist tendencies in her old home are as well as with the hedonistic self-optimizing drive of her generation.
December 2019
The installation speak about the ideology of the Fourteen Words – this idea that some white people think they are in an eternal racial war, to create a “clean” society. It also refers to the killings of the NSU, which often killed people in their stores, shooting owners behind their desks.
December 2019
Gripped by a wave of völkisch feeling of togetherness, Austria abruptly decides to join the now reunited Germany.
December 2019
The background of the work are prepper networks that are preparing themselves for a violent systemic change in Germany. Home accessories and design classics become weapons with which everyone can fight on Day X in Germany.
December 2019
Henrike Naumann conducts archaeology of the recent past. In „Die Monotonie des Yeah, Yeah, Yeah“ she immerses us, in the midst of a shoe shop of the 1990s, in an exaggerated version of a past world.
December 2019
East German objects mingle with cartoonish furniture for a Flintstonesque “neo-Paleolithic”. Naumann’s work inquires into the abiding appeal of utopias that promise to reduce the complexity of contemporary life and beckon with the construction of an ostensibly simple past.
Written on 16. February 2026
Henrike Naumann passed away on February 14, 2026, surrounded by her family and friends in Berlin, after a cancer diagnosis that came far too late. Henrike asked us to send a final farewell to all the people who accompanied her on her journey. At every stage of her life, she surrounded herself with loved ones, […]
| 21. February – 05. October 2025 | Eurotique – The Impermanent, MoMA Warsaw, PL |
| 25. January – 04. May 2025 | DDR Noir – Kunstsammlungen Zwickau |
| 04. April 2025 – 04. January 2026 | Aufbau West – New Collection Display, Mudam Luxemburg |
Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau (GDR) in 1984. She lives and works in Berlin.
Naumann reflects on socio-political problems on the level of design and interiors and explores the friction between opposing political opinions in dealing with taste and personal everyday aesthetics. In her immersive installations, she arranges furniture and objects creating scenographic spaces into which she integrates video and sound works. Her practice reflects the mechanisms of radicalization and their connection to personal experience. Her artistic practice is accompanied by a wide range of lectures and interdisciplinary collaborations reflecting on the questions immanent in her work.
She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship, the Max Pechstein Prize of the City of Zwickau, the Leipziger Volkszeitung Art Prize and the Scholarship of Villa Aurora / Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles. Important exhibitions of her works have been held at the SculptureCenter in New York, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard, the MoMA Warsaw, the Wall Memorial of the German Bundestag as well as the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti and the Kyiv Biennale in Ukraine.
Henrike Naumann is a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Program 2024/25. She has accepted a professorship in sculpture at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts starting in 2026. She is currently researching the relationship between art and war. Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu are the artists representing Germany at the 61st Venice Art Biennale in 2026
