The passing of Henrike Naumann

The President, the Director General, the Board of Directors, and the entire La Biennale di Venezia express their sincere condolences on the passing of the artist Henrike Naumann who, together with the Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu, represents Germany at the Biennale Arte 2026, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt.

Henrike Naumann, born in 1984 in Zwickau in former East Germany, explored the social and cultural transformations following German reunification through installations combining furniture, domestic objects, and sound. Her work transformed interior design into a critical tool for investigating identity and ideology, developing a vision of space as a political and narrative environment in which every object and every perspective contributes to constructing meaning, memory, and historical tension. In recent years, her career had gained increasing international visibility, with major participations such as documenta 15 in 2022. Naumann’s work remains a fundamental contribution to understanding the contradictions and complexities of contemporary society.