Henrike Naumann

Henrike Naumann’s installations of furniture and design objects are composed as scenes that ask pressing and enduring questions: What is the relationship between design and ideology? How should one read the politics of design? Inflected by her own formative years growing up in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and then a unified Germany, Naumann’s work often considers the social transformations initiated by Western consumer capitalism as it reached former socialist states and ideas of the ‘good life’ that have arisen globally (if unevenly).

Naumann contends with the many side effects visible today: millennial bourgeois consumerism, socioeconomic discontent, antagonistic orientations to political power, virulent extremism. Her installations function as case studies in lingering cultural moments, unresolved kitchen table politics, and design’s capacity to reconcile or reignite the past — positioning the viewer as both a captive in an oppressive system of global production and a free agent of consumer taste.

For Re-Education (2022) at SculptureCenter in New York, Naumann developed a museum-scaled display of dozens of furnishings and domestic items. Looking at the United States as an interested outsider, Naumann’s work uses found objects to test received ideas and expectations of the democratic ‘West’, as well as the fraught idealism and amnesia expressed in the norms of certain rustic contemporary design principles.

Naumann’s exhibition referenced two phenomena: first, the deployment of anti-fascist ‘re-education’ programmes developed by Allied forces to re-establish a footing for democracy in West Germany after World War II; and second, the later, implicit, self-’re-education’ after 1989 of those living in former socialist states, such as Naumann’s native East Germany. For Naumann’s post-1989 generation, ‘re-education’ happened through an imported American pop culture (Naumann cites The Flintstones as a touchstone) and increased consumer agency – in essence, the GDR entering Western history through retail and media. The exhibition also includes a survey of more than 10 video works by Naumann made between 2012 and 2022.

Henrike Naumann (b. 1984, Zwickau, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Her work reflects socio-political problems on the level of interior design and domestic space, and explores antagonistic political beliefs through the ambivalent aesthetics of personal taste. In her immersive installations, she arranges furniture and home decor into scenographic spaces interspersed with video and sound work.