1992 – 2025

The research-driven artistic practice of Sung Tieu (* 1987, VN) examines the inextricable tensions between individual lived experiences and the overarching mechanisms of systemic regulation, with a critical lens on Germany’s divided history. Moving between installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, text, video, and sound, her work unveils the hidden structural logics that shape social inclusion and political existence, deconstructing categories of legality and illegality, inclusion and exclusion. Rooted in the visual language of conceptual art, Tieu has developed a distinctive style that operates at the intersection of form and function. Her practice interrogates the design, architecture, and administrative frameworks of public institutions as semiotic systems, exposing their often-overlooked dynamics of control, surveillance, and disciplining.In her new body of work, 1992, 2025, Tieu deepens her ongoing critical engagement with the 1980 recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which led to the migration of approximately 60,000 Vietnamese contract workers to the GDR during the 1980s. While previous exhibitions focused on the living and working conditions of these workers up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this exhibition shifts its lens to the far-reaching consequences of the GDR’s collapse. Through a series of newly commissioned works and an accompanying publication, Tieu investigates how the political and social upheavals, along with the pervasive racialised structures and discrimination of that era, have impacted the identities, roles, and social networks of the Vietnamese community in Germany—and continue to shape them to this day.Sung Tieu is the recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2024, which has been awarded jointly with the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion since 2020. In addition to prize money, the award covers an exhibition that encompasses the production of new works as well as a publication that is scheduled for release in April 2025.