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.
May 2022
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.
Written on 30. July 2022
2000 in Gropius Bau Berlin Thursday, 04.08.2022 17.00—19.30Gropius Bau, 2nd floorFree admission with pre-registrationINFOS This lecture by Valeria Schiller and the following conversation between her and Henrike Naumann, who will join online, discuss the cultural-historical connections and parallels between Kyiv and Berlin in context of the division between East and West, and the position of […]
| 4. August 2022 17.00–19.30 | Thank you for bringing my work back home – Gropius Bau Berlin |
| 4. / 5. / 6. / 7. August 2022 | Back Home – Gropius Bau Berlin |
| until 2. Oktober 2022 | Westalgie – la Synagoge de Delme, FR |
| until 25. September 2022 | Atis Rezistans / Ghetto Biennale – d15 Kassel |
| until 3. Oktober 2022 | Identity not proven – Bundeskunsthalle Bonn |
| until 19. Februar 2023 | Avant-Garde and the Contemporary – Belvedere21 Wien |
Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau 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 opinons 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. Growing up in East Germany, Henrike Naumann experienced Neo-Nazis as a dominant youth culture in the 1990s. Her practice reflects the mechanisms of radicalization and their connection to personal experience.