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
Schlemmer Meisterhaus DessauPermanent installation2024 The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has organised an invited competition for the artistic design/furnishing of the Muche | Schlemmer Meisterhaus in 2023. The first residents of the Meisterhaus were the painter and stage designer Oskar Schlemmer, his wife Tut and their children Karin, Jaina and Tilman. After he left the Bauhaus in […]
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 11. September 2024
Harvard, Cambridge (USA), 11. September 2024 Ossification– Lecture Performance ᵉⁿAt the opening of the exhibition Made in Germany? at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (Harvard Art Museums), I will speak in depth about my work on view, Ostalgie, and take the audience on a journey through German history and the political present, while providing an overview of my practice over […]
| 12. September – 5. January 2025 | Made in Germany – Harvard Art Museums, USA |
| 22. November – 22. February 2025 | Atis Resistans Ghetto Biennale – UMOCA Salt Lake City, USA |
| 28. November 2024 – 6pm | Real Talk – Lecture Henrike Naumann – UdK Berlin |
| 28. November – 1. December 2024 | Tokyo Art Book Fair, Japan |
Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau (GDR) in 1984. She lives and works in Berlin and London.
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. Although she has dealt intensively with German history in her work, Naumann constantly questions this perspective by working in different international contexts. Her artistic practice is accompanied by a wide range of lectures and interdisciplinary collaborations reflecting on the questions immanent in her work. Henrike Naumann is a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Program 2024/25.