Exploitation, Past and Present: Negotiating the Afterlives of German Reunification

by Christopher Williams-Wynn · Published 04/20/2025

Sung Tieu, 1992, 2025, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, February 15 – May 4, 2025

“…the question arises as to whether all social models of the modern era are not more or less successful attempts to delegate the horrors of exploitation to a majority in the interests of a minority or to various minorities in the name of a majority…”—Heiner Müller, “Das Liebesleben der Hyänen,” 1993*

Over two floors at the KW Institute in Berlin, Sung Tieu’s exhibition 1992, 2025 offers a precise set of reflections on the legacies of German reunification. Her works, from salvaged commodities to archival prints on polished steel, give pause to consider the points of intersection between the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Although primarily focused on the treatment of contracted workers from Vietnam in the GDR and their struggle to find a place in the FRG after reunification, the works explore a host of broader, related problems that orbit around social marginalization and institutional power. These topics are somewhat familiar terrain in Tieu’s work (as seen in her exhibitions No Jobs, No Country (2023) at n. b. k. in Berlin and Civic Floor (2023) at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA), but they take on a more personal note at KW. With the exhibition bracketed by the year in which the artist arrived in Germany and the present, it covers a period in which a systemic inability to come to terms with the past affected Tieu, her friends, and her family, not least of all because her mother was one of those seeking to establish residency.

That personal investment complements a commitment to formal and historical rigor. Although the exhibition was held to mark Tieu’s receipt of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, her practice avoids merely dumping an “abundance of information” into the gallery space, a tendency that critic Claire Bishop recently characterized as an undiscerning renunciation of judgment.(Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (London: Verso, 2024), 64.) Rather, Tieu offers arguments about historical continuities—of labor exploitation and structural racism—that persist through time and across different political systems. Her assembled objects and display tactics, especially the use of reflective surfaces, demonstrate how the evaluation of reunification and its aftermath becomes a matter of perspectives and positions, of choosing how to look and where to stand. The forms of these objects shape understanding of their histories and contemporary entanglements, with consequences for the mode of critique that she adopts. In order to unspool these threads, curator Léon Kruijswijk—with whom Tieu closely worked—loosely mapped the temporal split of the exhibition onto an institutionally-determined spatial division. While the first floor is dedicated to the ends of the GDR and the aftermath of its dissolution in the 1990s, the group of works on the second floor foreground strategies, both institutional and individual, for coming to terms with the aftermath.

Installation view of the exhibition Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2024: Sung Tieu – 1992, 2025 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2025; courtesy the artist, Photo: Frank Sperling.

The contradictions of the socialist system are integral to the key work on the first floor. Neatly laid end-to-end, three carpets occupy the center of the main room. Their intricate patterns and warm, rich colors suggest, at least to the untrained eye, that they are “Persian” carpets, normally carefully woven by highly skilled artisans. But, as the title Cultural Appropriation (in the GDR) (2025) indicates, these objects do double duty: they are commodities that stand in for others. They are in fact mass-produced simulations that were machine-woven in the GDR. When it was a matter of obtaining hard currency, “real existing socialism” could drop the façade of solidarity and mutual respect. As did multinationals in the Cold War West, industrial enterprises in the GDR sought out new export opportunities, whether aligned with the state’s declared socialist values or not, and relied on a combination of automated production and cheap labor for such items to be competitive in international markets. The prominent display of these works that combine symbolic appropriation and material exploitation announces one of the core concerns of the exhibition: to undermine strict divisions between socialist and capitalist modernity.

Suspended above the carpets, a set of furniture from the GDR hang between the two floors of the exhibition. Affixed to the ceiling with wire and hooks, a sofa, coffee table, armchair and other furniture hang motionless three meters above the floor, close by but out of reach. Even if Midair (2025), as this assembly is titled, risks becoming “hieratic” (as art historian Benjamin Buchloh once described the display of isolated readymades) that would be fitting, for the work raises the specter of the form of reification in the GDR.(Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Plenty or Nothing: From Yves Klein’s Le Vide to Arman’s Le Plein,” in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (1998; repr., Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000), 276.) The accumulation of economic value relied on contracted labor from so-called sozialistische Brüderländer. The state entered into a series of contracts with the governments of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cuba, Mozambique, Algeria, Syria, and Vietnam to supply workers for industries—from textiles and light manufacturing (including construction of furniture) to healthcare and agriculture—that continually experienced shortages. Between 1980 and 1990, almost 72,000 workers from Vietnam arrived in the GDR.(Alena K. Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel, “From Socialist Assistance to National Self-Interest: Vietnamese Labor Migration into CMEA Countries,” in Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, ed. James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 109.) Although framed by authorities as a matter of international solidarity, conditions for laborers were anything but “brotherly.”(Workers were frequently underpaid, forced to live in dormitories, segregated from the rest of the population, prohibited from engaging in relationships, and, sometimes, forced to undergo abortions. While Tieu focuses especially on Vietnam, the exploitative dimensions of “brotherly” relationships between the GDR and other countries were covered more extensively in Echos der Bruderländer (2024) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.) Although Midair does not formulate the charge explicitly, its collection of objects invites consideration as to whether, and if so, to what extent, the GDR functioned as a neo-colonial state, one that exploited, through financial and legal arrangements, other polities and bodies for its own maintenance, and so perpetuated its own forms of racialized violence.

Reunification provided no safe harbor. Below the suspended furniture stand two mannequins, one roughly the height of an adult and the other the height of a child, perhaps one only a few years old, as Tieu was when she migrated to the FRG. Entitled Read Me, Wear Me, Fear Me (2025), the pair of silent figures attest to the extent to which virulent prejudice had taken hold in the 1990s. Both are clad in cotton clothing printed with newspaper reports of right-wing attacks on immigrants that took place in Hoyerswerda and Rostock (and elsewhere) in 1991 and 1992. These reports, from the Berliner Zeitung to The New York Times, include coverage of the death of Nguyễn Văn Tú, who had come to the GDR from Vietnam as a contract worker and stayed in the FRG. On April 24, 1992, he was visiting friends in Marzahn, a district in eastern Berlin, where he was stabbed and killed by a sympathizer with the far-right German People’s Union (DVU). As reported in multiple newspapers, among the most troubling aspects of the crime was the indifference of bystanders. Members of the public were apparently so unmoved by Nguyễn bleeding to death that no one came to his aid and no one called an ambulance. His friends had to take him to a clinic, and after being transferred to a hospital he died. By showing the volume of reporting, and associating it with the garment industry in which many contracted laborers worked, Read Me, Wear Me, Fear Me makes clear both the extent of racialized violence and the objectification visited upon certain bodies.

To the extent that Read Me, Wear Me, Fear Me relies on mass media reporting of violent episodes of xenophobia to make its point, it highlights the limits of a strategy of appropriation to advance its own critical agenda. After all, calls for a body politic free of Ausländer and the resurgence of a hostile ethno-nationalism found relatively broad support that did not necessarily feature in high-profile newspaper reports. During state elections in April 1992, the right-wing Republikaner and the DVU became, respectively, the third-strongest parties in Baden-Württemberg and Schleswig-Holstein.(Both parties were founded in former West Germany. The DVU later merged with the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD), the ethno-centric and nationalist policies of which recalled the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). It renamed itself Die Heimat in 2023.) By the end of the year, the political establishment had internalized this nationalistic turn. The center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) reached an Asylkompromiss. This political deal changed Article 16 of the Basic Law, making it more difficult to exercise a fundamental right to asylum. Not only did those restrictions disproportionately affect the most marginalized individuals, including the former contract workers on whom Tieu focuses, their consequences echo down to the present in the often-acrimonious discussions over migration in Germany.

After being regarded as so much disposable labor in the GDR and as so many unwanted foreign bodies in the FRG, migrant workers had to formulate new methods for survival amidst social conditions that were increasingly hostile in public space. A canny installation of recorded sound and concrete garbage cans from the GDR conjure an urban space of furtive encounters and public vulnerability. Only a sketch of public space, the installation hints at the ways that street traders, often originally from Vietnam, turned to selling cigarettes and other goods on which taxes and duties had not been paid, and used the garbage cans as caches for these wares. Mounted on the adjacent wall, the sequence of prints in Unspeakable Compromise #2 (2025) depicts one of these traders making an escape from the authorities. As the images are halftone prints on plates of polished stainless steel, and the plates are lit from overhead, the effect is such that the depicted scenes only cohere out of the corner of one’s eye. Looking “directly” does not reveal the scene, and grasping the sequence requires walking alongside the prints. Close scrutiny requires that one look elsewhere and shift position, lending the images a fugitive quality that echoes the lived experience of those street traders. Given that the prints are based on archival photographs, the display implies that historical awareness requires peripheral vision and an acute awareness of the effects wrought by institutional conditions of reception.

On the second floor, punctuated by a void in which the suspended furniture hangs like a specter, tactics for negotiating institutional pressure take prime position. Installed on plinths and neatly placed under Perspex vitrines, a second set of readymades show how goods were smuggled, how tobacco was stuffed inside tins filled with Vaseline or packets of cigarettes were housed inside modified books. One of these, Object of Suspicion (Politische Ökonomie des Sozialismus) (2025), makes concrete the interwoven character of the GDR and FRG too. Two packets of Marlboros, famously icons of the “rugged individualism” and pioneer mythologies of the American West, rests in the space carved out from inside the eponymous German-language textbook on the New Economic System, which was implemented in the 1960s in an attempt to match consumer production in the West.(Politische Ökonomie Des Sozialismus Und Ihre Anwendung in Der DDR (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1969).) As well as signaling the necessarily hidden place of Western consumer goods in the GDR, this work deftly conveys the residual use of the GDR’s technocratic vision. No longer just a tract outlining a socialist economic system, the book offers the means to negotiate the interstices of that system’s capitalist counterpart.

View of Object of Suspicion (Politische Ökonomie des Sozialismus) (2025). Artwork © Sung Tieu. Photo: the author.

The continuing effects of racialized violence constitute another field where the legacies of the GDR and FRG align. Mounted directly onto the wall, a set of highly polished stainless steel reliefs, each approximately the size of an A4 sheet of paper, document Tieu’s engagement with local cultural authorities. Thirty-one years after his death, the district authority in Marzahn sought proposals for a memorial to Nguyễn. Tieu, in collaboration with community members, formulated and proposed a commemorative plan, and criticized the process for its lack of involvement of the Vietnamese diaspora in Berlin. Authorities dismissed her proposal on “procedural” grounds, a typical administrative excuse for rejection that appeals to order and regulations in the name of impartiality. The finality of that disqualification sharply contrasts with the contingency of spectatorship brought to the fore by the polished surfaces. Once again, lighting conditions alter the legibility of the text, reinforcing the point that one must constantly negotiate shifting institutional circumstances.

A reckoning with institutions extends to KW, too. At the other end of the gallery, Tieu offers another proposal on reflective steel plates. Four panels comprise Contractual Terms for Appointing a New Board Member at KW (2025), the sale of which is to be used to fund membership for a new member proposed by the artist. The price—at €25,000—reflects the hefty annual cost of membership for the full five years of Emma Enderby’s term as the director of KW. A separate proposal, to reserve free positions, was rejected by KW owing to the costs of organization (as recounted in Letter to the Board (2025) and Letter from the Board (2025) on display around the corner). These prints highlight the fact that attempts to diversify representation on the board of KW must reckon with its hierarchy and internal power plays. As the Executive Board retains the right to confirm or reject a proposal, liberal consensus-building marks the limit of potential change. By predicating the legibility of these letters on conditions in the gallery, Tieu stages the complicity of KW in the administration of cultural representation. Not unlike the bureaucracy in Marzahn, the organization does not just manage visibility, but the very possibility of historical redress.

The exhibition’s central concern with administrative power provides an opportunity to take stock of “institutional critique,” or whatever it might be called today. Whether the historical critique of art institutions has become an institution itself, or that interrogative impulse has been redirected towards infrastructure or rerouted to form new institutions, these attempts boil down to a matter, as Michel Foucault put it, “of not being governed quite so much” by established authorities.(Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth (1978; repr., New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 45.) Amidst the field of critical stances, three stand out. The first, call it the school of rejection, carries the torch of negation. For artists like Cameron Rowland, the aim is to undercut, thwart, stymie or otherwise deny the basis for contemporary and historical forms of exploitation, as seen in his trenchant critiques of property and the legacies of slavery. The second, the school of redemption, as can be seen in work by Theaster Gates, seeks to forge new institutions in communities or develop new types of collective action. A third position, the school of redirection, falls somewhere in the middle. It neither disavows institutions nor establishes them anew. Instead, it tends to work within them, leveraging their resources to execute its own agenda. Sometimes it generates friction and incites a response in order to make visible the contradictions and limits of its host. That is possible in Tieu’s case, as she was invited into the institution. While not quite a case of infiltration, then, her project nonetheless refuses to play along with the proprieties expected of the invited guest.

Enmeshed with the machinations of cultural bureaucracy and grappling with the aftershocks of reunification, Tieu’s work shows the immense challenge of shifting the priorities of existing institutions. Indeed, the reflective surfaces of her work imply that institutional conditions will inevitably encroach on attempts to formulate alternatives. In other words, 1992, 2025 proposes that the long march through institutions must continue, not to replace or reject them, but to reform them. The prospects, it must be said, do not look encouraging. In the most recent elections in Germany, over 25% of voters in Rostock chose the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, and in Bautzen, the district that includes Hoyerswerda, that figure stands at 48%. It remains to be seen if strategies of reform can be sustained, not least because a new round of austerity jeopardizes cultural institutions in Germany, and the parallel ascent of the right into positions of political power represents a threat to the basic order of the FRG. Under this new dispensation, Tieu insists upon the necessity of finding routes of resistance, of developing new positions and tactics against the odds.

* Translation by Christopher Williams-Wynn.

Christopher Williams-Wynn

Christopher Williams-Wynn is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the 4A_Lab, a joint programme of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. Focusing on modern and contemporary art, his research examines how media have been used to explore the epistemological claims, political consequences, and aesthetic implications of disciplinary knowledge and practice. His research has received generous support from the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Krupp Foundation, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, among other institutions. His peer-reviewed writing has appeared in Grey Room, The Art Bulletin, Modernism/Modernity, Third Text, and Photography and Culture. He received his PhD in art history from Harvard University.

Exploitation, Past and Present: Negotiating the Afterlives of German Reunification

Christopher Williams-Wynn

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