When silence is not absence, but pressure
Sung Tieu does not work with grand gestures, heroic slogans or loud protest. Her resistance lies in precision, in silence, in documents, in buildings, and in everything administrations would rather keep invisible. Her work shows how power does not only manifest itself in political systems or historical monuments, but also in everyday life: in labour contracts, migration policies, bureaucratic language, housing complexes, and the question of who is allowed to appear within a national narrative.
Born in Hải Dương, Vietnam, in 1987 and based in Germany since childhood, Tieu moves between installation, sound, text, video, sculpture and research. Her practice is careful, restrained and unsettling. She does not announce resistance as spectacle, but exposes the structures that determine who is allowed to belong, who is registered, who is displaced and who remains invisible within official histories.
Tieu’s biography is inseparable from this research, but her work is never simply autobiographical. She uses her own history as a lens through which larger systems become visible: migration, labour, exclusion, reunification, national identity and institutional amnesia.
This is precisely why her participation in the German Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale is so significant. The German Pavilion is not a neutral space. It was originally designed in 1909 as the Bavarian Pavilion and, in 1938 under the Nazi regime, was given its stricter, more monumental appearance. That charged architecture has previously been confronted by artists such as Hans Haacke and Maria Eichhorn. Where Eichhorn literally opened up and stripped back the building, Tieu, according to Frieze, chooses a different movement: she adds something. Her statement, “As an immigrant, I see myself also as an add-on,” is essential here. Not as an apology, but as a method. Tieu adds a history to a national architecture that never naturally made room for that history.
In her studio, Frieze describes a large maquette of the German Pavilion. That image is telling: a building that normally radiates national power and cultural representation lies reduced on a table. History has not disappeared, but has been made manageable. Not to neutralise it, but to look at it again. This is where Tieu’s strength lies: she approaches history not as something abstract, but as something that remains present in space, scale, material and memory.
The element Tieu adds is connected to Gehrenseestraße, a former housing complex in East Berlin where Vietnamese contract workers and their families lived. Tieu herself lived there with her mother after her family had come to Germany through the GDR. Built from 1977 onwards, the complex became the largest residential site for contract workers from socialist-allied countries of the GDR. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, tens of thousands of Vietnamese workers were left in a legal grey zone. Their labour was no longer welcome, their presence became uncertain, and their history disappeared to the margins of the official narrative.
For Tieu, Gehrenseestraße is a ruin of the GDR, but also a place of community, survival and memory. That is what makes her work so powerful. She does not simply bring a migration story into the German Pavilion. She places a forgotten architecture against an official architecture. The housing block against the national monument. The contract worker against state representation. The margin against the centre.
This is where her Silent Resistance lies. This resistance is not passive. It is the refusal to disappear. It is the act of remaining present within systems that would rather treat your presence as temporary, useful or administratively inconvenient. It is the force of something that does not shout, but continues to press.
Her work makes visible how history does not only live in monuments, but also in corridors, files, rooms, waiting areas, contracts and abandoned buildings. A bureaucratic trace can contain violence. A ruin can carry a community. A housing complex can become a monument without ever having been officially intended as one.
Tieu also resists simple labels. In Frieze, her collaboration with Henrike Naumann and curator Kathleen Reinhardt is described as having sometimes been reduced to a kind of “East German Pavilion”. Tieu warns that such terms can also confine. She does not want to simplify. She wants to complicate. Not to create one single story, but to allow multiple layers to become visible at once. Her method is powerful precisely because of this: nothing is unambiguous, nothing is only personal, nothing is only political.
That is what makes her work urgent. In a time of migration, nationalism and renewed struggles over who belongs to a country, Sung Tieu shows that national identity is never pure, complete or innocent. A country is not made only of official buildings and canonical histories, but also of those who have worked, lived, waited, translated, survived and often remained unacknowledged within it.
Silent Resistance, in relation to Sung Tieu, is the power of not disappearing. What was once treated as background — the migrant, the contract worker, the housing block, the file, the administrative category — becomes, in Tieu’s work, the centre of history again. Her work shows that silence is not emptiness. Silence can be evidence. Silence can be pressure. Silence, when held with precision, can become a form of power.
Biennale Information
Exhibition: RUIN
Artists: Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu
Curator: Kathleen Reinhardt
Location: German Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
Year: 2026
Specific work mentioned in Frieze: Read Me, Wear Me, Fear Me, 2025
RUIN is the title of the pavilion exhibition in which Sung Tieu represents Germany together with the late artist Henrike Naumann. In Frieze, the work Read Me, Wear Me, Fear Me, 2025, is mentioned and illustrated as a detail. The text also states that the details of Tieu’s installation for the German Pavilion were still under press embargo at the time. It is therefore accurate to use RUIN as the title of the pavilion exhibition, and to mention Read Me, Wear Me, Fear Me only as the specific work referred to in Frieze.
Sources
German Pavilion 2026, RUIN — Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu, 61st Venice Biennale.
ifa — Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, announcement of Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu for the German Pavilion 2026.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2024: Sung Tieu.
Frieze, issue 259, History, Shrunk, profile on Sung Tieu, 2026.
The Guardian, interview/profile on Sung Tieu and the German Pavilion, 2026.
