“Forever and ever, Henrike Naumann”

The artist Henrike Naumann passed away in Berlin on February 14 at the age of 41, just a few months before the opening of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which she had played a key role in shaping. Her friends and colleagues reflect on the extraordinary work of this “enthusiastic explorer of human history” — and her rare gift for building friendship and connection.

Chris Shongo, multi-media artist, Kinshasa

I shared many unforgettable moments with Henrike Naumann, including nighttime walks and dreams that often took shape through our collaboration. After a conversation with the artist Bebson de La Rue, we once walked together late in the evening to the Maison de Passage at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, where Henrike was living at the time. We exchanged ideas, and she invited me to present my photographs as part of her project “Intercouture. Objets de pouvoir.” She trusted me. Later, I went with Henrike’s partner Clemens to the Stade des Martyrs to see my first football derby: Daring Club Motema Pembe versus FC Renaissance du Congo — a match that ended in violent clashes between the fans. I also had the honor of blessing Henrike's marriage to Clemens in Kinshasa, right in front of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Congo.

Junior Mvunzi, multimedia artist, Kinshasa

Rest in peace, my dear colleague and friend. You will always remain in my heart, because you were one of the first to believe in me and in my work. In 2016, you invited me to take part in your exhibition at the Musée d'Art Contemporain et Multimédia, organized by the Goethe-Institut Kinshasa, directed by Gitte Zschoch. You were in Kinshasa with Clemens, and I remember that you called me “Baby Tupac.” Thanks to you, I exhibited in a public space for the first time. I am very sad, but I thank my ancestors for bringing us together. I used to call you “Forever Naumann”. Now I can only say, forever and ever, Henrike Naumann.

Oracle Ngoy, rapper and performance artist, Kinshasa 

I met Henrike Naumann in 2016 during her residency at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa. She invited me to take part in her project “Intercouture. Objets de pouvoir.” We selected costumes together and prepared a joint performance, and through that process a connection grew between us. Later, together with artists such as Matti Schulz and Chris Shongo, and with support from the co-production fund of the Goethe-Institut, we realized the project “Yambi,” which was intended to strengthen and expand connections between the art scenes in Kinshasa and Berlin. We were more than just colleagues — we were friends and we were there for one another. In Kinshasa, we also collaborated with the artist Junior Mvunzi. He looked a bit like Tupac Shakur, Henrike thought, and she took photographs of him. I didn’t know him before that, but afterward we went on to complete many projects together. Henrike ushered new networks came into being, not least because she had a beautiful soul and was a very special person — the kind that is rare in our time. Her death has affected me deeply. May she rest in peace.

Mukenge/Schellhammer (Christ Mukenge, Lydia Schellhammer), Multimedia artist, Kinshasa 

With her curiosity and open-minded nature, Henrike Naumann forged unusual connections, bringing people together, and revealing common ground often through seemingly inconspicuous details. She was the first international artist to have an exhibition at the Musée d'Art Contemporain et Multimédia in Kinshasa. From this first institutional collaboration, a long-term partnership developed between the museum and the Goethe-Institut. We are currently working on an exhibition at this museum — a cooperation with the Kunsthalle Gießen and the Goethe-Institut Kinshasa — which was only made possible through Henrike Naumann’s groundwork. We have lost a friend, an advisor, and a source of inspiration. In gratitude and mourning: “Les artistes ne meurent jamais.”

Susanne Titz, director of Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach 

“Aufbau West” (or in English, “rebuilding the West”, a play on words about the phrase “rebuilding the East”) was the title of one of Henrike Naumann’s early exhibitions in 2017, and its location alone, the western city of Cologne — already signaled that her work was about more than East Germany and East Germans. It was also about West Germany and West Germans. And about contemporary Germany and recent history. “Aufbau West” took place at GOLD+BETON, the art space run by Meryem Erkus, a former shop unit in a shopping centre beneath Ebertplatz in Cologne that had previously stood empty. That show led us to invite Henrike Naumann to hold an exhibition at the Museum Abteiberg in 2018. Naumann’s arrangement of objects had transformed the space beneath Cologne’s Ebertplatz into an unbearably sad shop filled with consumer goods from the 1990s. It was no longer recognizable as an art space or gallery. Her installation included a wobbly Coca-Cola can, a crying clown, and various ornaments laid out like it was a desperate clearance sale, along with chrome furniture and glass shelves. Outside the venue hung the flag of the cigarette brand West. On discreetly placed old television sets, VHS tapes showed her diploma project “Triangular Stories” and “Terror” — a reenactment of events involving the NSU terrorists Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos, and Beate Zschäpe performed by Naumann’s fellow students — as well as “Ibiza,” an enactment of hedonists of the same generation in the 1990s. I did not immediately recognize their status as artworks, but instead tried to interpret them as private documents. Everything suited this venue as if the installation were a portrait of the oppressive “just-past” (Dan Graham). The just-past is aesthetically the worst. The haircut from five years ago, the jeans from ten years ago, the cars from fifteen years ago. Following this exhibition, Henrike Naumann and I got to know each other. She spoke not only of East and West, but also of a development she viewed more broadly through the lens of aesthetics — namely, a process relevant to the history of consumerism, capitalism, and society, and part of postmodernism. In Naumann’s words, it spanned “Hans Hollein to Möbel Höffner,” (connecting a leading voice in high-cultural postmodernism with a high-street German furniture chain).

Matti Schulz, artist, Berlin

I have known Henrike since the beginning of our studies in 2006 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK Dresden), and she always stood out as a very special person. Above all, her warmth, her humour, her intelligence, and her talent for constantly discovering the most amazing and unusual objects and giving them a new sense of value impressed me both then and today. When we were in Kinshasa together in 2019 for an art project in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, I once again realized how deeply Henrike was loved for her openness and her warmhearted nature — also by our Congolese friends. I loved walking with her through the Grand Marché, searching for especially cool replicas, originals, and other souvenirs. In her visionary artistic practice, she succeeded in engaging with political and social questions with such intellectual complexity that she became a beacon for many of us — especially for artists in eastern Germany. Henrike possessed the rare ability to intervene in social processes through her art. It is painful to now speak about her in the past tense. With her, we are losing a unique human being, a friend, and an artist of extraordinary radiance. Without doubt, she would have become an even more significant voice in German and international contemporary art than she already was. My deepest sympathy goes to Clemens, Nina, and the entire family. Thank you for everything, Henrike!

(Berlin, February 22, 2026)

Wilfried Beki, artist, Kinshasa 

For me, Henrike embodied both creative power and bonne volonté humaine—the human will toward good: she had a kind heart, a constant smile, and a beautiful human soul. Combining success with a kind heart is not easy, but she managed it. She was a great artist; all my Sapeur friends agree on that. (A Sapeur in the Congo is part of the movement La Sape, the “Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes,” a kind of dandy, editor’s note.) Even my grandmother, the owner of the house where we realized the Yambi project in Kinshasa, said to me during the exhibition setup: “I like this girl; she has the face of a very kind person.” An extraordinary artist and a person with a big heart — what a loss.

Thank you, Henrike!

Gitte Zschoch, Secretary General of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart

I first met Henrike when she came to Kinshasa in 2016 as an artist-in-residence at the Goethe-Institut. At the time, I was the director of the institute there and had invited her on the recommendation of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Before that, she had been in Haiti, where she created the “Museum of Trance” for the Ghetto Biennale. Such a curious and open-minded artist was a perfect fit for Kinshasa. She arrived together with her partner Clemens Villinger and stayed in a bungalow at the art academy. During that time, she was interested in the relationship between fashion and power, in fake designer fashion and iconic logos such as the Medusa head of Versace. She not only developed her own works but also invited young artists she had met in Kinshasa to collaborate with her. For many of them, this experience was decisive. Henrike’s “Intercouture. Objets du pouvoir” was the first contemporary art exhibition to occupy the Echangeur de Limité, a modernist building from the era of optimism following Congo’s independence.

“What are the underlying structures, what is fair, what is good collaboration? And: How important is radical openness?”

At the time, we spoke a great deal about growing up in the GDR and about what happened after reunification: to people’s minds, to their feelings, to aesthetics, in spaces — these were central themes in her work. Never in a romanticized or nostalgic sense, but always with curiosity, questioning, and critical reflection. Even in her early works on the National Socialist Underground (NSU), she explored the question: “Why do young people radicalize, what turns them into terrorists?” It is a highly political approach. But she spoke through her art, not through public statements.

At ifa, we aim to think of art as a space of encounter across borders in an international context. That is why we so greatly valued working with Henrike Naumann here as well. Her art was not only original and relevant, but aesthetically accessible. You can enter it and often even sit on beds or sofas. This art is not elitist; it seeks dialogue with the audience. Henrike collaborated with us on the project EVROVIZION and also on DDR Noir. Now, in her final work, together with Sung Tieu, she will represent Germany at the Venice Biennale in the German Pavilion. It is not insignificant that the two of them will be the first artists from East Germany to exhibit there. The curator, Kathleen Reinhardt, is also from Thuringia. This is an issue that does not resonate in the same way with people in the West. For people from the East, whose biographies experienced a radical rupture, it remains essential.

There is a fitting story that connects Henrike and me biographically. We are the same age. We discovered that when we started school in 1990 — after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before reunification — we received the same school cone with the same Russian comic characters on it. These are points of connection in life that are more than just anecdotal. Added to this is our shared experience in Kinshasa, which was formative and meaningful for both of us, albeit for different reasons. Henrike told me it was the first time she had been able to produce art with a budget and under fair conditions. We spoke a great deal about that: What are the underlying structures? What is fair? What is good collaboration? And: How important is radical openness?

This is all the more reason for us to look forward to her work at the Biennale in Venice.

Ekaterina Degot, artistic director of steierischer herbst, Graz 

When we began working on my first edition, “Volksfronten,” at steirischer herbst in 2018, I heard for the first time about a young German artist named Henrike Naumann, who — astonishingly — managed to artistically capture the rise of the far right in Germany. I was immediately captivated; we met and instantly understood one another. For our commissioned work, she invented an alternative course of history in which the wave of German reunification spilled over into Austria and triggered another “Anschluss.” As always, she told this story through a selection of rather crazy furniture and objects from that period, which she tracked down at flea markets in Graz. It was great fun to watch as she kept bringing more and more of them into the office. We laughed a lot.

“She was an independent thinker, an enthusiastic explorer of human history and its social and political conflicts”

I was instantly impressed and fascinated by Henrike’s ability to recognise the political significance of everyday objects. I owned some products by Alessi, but had never really thought about them. Through her fiction, she revealed the not-so-latent violence even in the most hopeful of times — and I liked that. Her  approach was intelligent and analytical, yet never dry; highly conscious of form, yet never formalistic; clearly political, yet never an empty slogan. And the scale of her work… she was capable of creating entire worlds, something I — perhaps idealistically — expect from art. It was something that she  always achieved.

She was everything I imagine a contemporary artist to be: an independent thinker, an enthusiastic explorer of human history and its social and political conflicts, a true materialist and dialectician. The fact that she was born in the GDR and grew up with the “wall in people’s minds” gave her a unique perspective. Thanks to my hated yet acknowledged Soviet identity, we always had something to talk about — not only the past, such as the ruthless neo-capitalist turn known as German reunification, but also the present and the future. The future, which now seems ever more complex, absurd, and violent; the future she will no longer live to see. It breaks my heart to think about all that she will miss—but also what I will miss living without her art and her brilliant personality.

Sarah Alberti, author, moderator and art historian, Leipzig 

“State Art” was the simple title Henrike Naumann gave to her lecture performance on September 18, 2025, at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. Within two minutes of starting her talk, she mentions  that she comes from a country that no longer exists. Born in 1984 in Zwickau in the GDR, she spoke about early memories of fashion shows at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst Schneeberg: “Year after year I sat excitedly on the floor in the front row, intoxicated by the impressions. When I stage performances today, I often think back to that and try to convey this feeling and experience to the audience.”

That evening in Leipzig was the last time I saw Henrike: she was already deeply involved in preparations for the German Pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale. When it was publicly announced on May 26, 2025, that curator Kathleen Reinhardt had selected not only Sung Tieu but also Henrike as artistic positions for Venice, I danced through the office with joy. For years it had been noted that the pavilion had never been curated by an East German curator and never presented an East German artist. Now three East German women are rocking the Olympus of contemporary art. As recently as 2022, Henrike stated that throughout her professional career it had repeatedly become clear to her that, as a woman from the eastern part of the country, she had to “try harder, work harder, and persevere more uncompromisingly.” This decisively shaped both her and her work. She is also among the few who devoted themselves to East Germany at a time when it was not yet hip, cool, or a topic on political talk shows.

I was born in 1989—still in the GDR. For a long time, I felt somewhat uncomfortable about my East German background; I was proud to speak hardly any dialect and not to be immediately read as an “Ossi.” Henrike’s self-confident handling of her origins in the art world was a role model and motivation for me: until the very end, she insisted on adding “(GDR)” after her birthplace Zwickau. Ever since I first saw that on her website, I have added to my own short biography that I was “born in the GDR eight months before the fall of the Wall.”

Unfortunately, we only met in person a few times. One of the highlights was our visit to the Federal Chancellery. At the initiative of the then Federal Government Commissioner for Eastern Germany, Carsten Schneider, Gitte Zschoch, Secretary General of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, had assembled a group with concentrated East German expertise from the cultural sector to discuss questions of cultural funding. Henrike greatly enjoyed the 1990s building—it was completely her era. We took a group photo with her analog camera right in the foyer. We had fun in front of the Chancellery Gallery. In the scanned photos she sent us a few days later, she stands confidently between Schröder and Kohl. As early as July 22, 2021, she had written a letter to the then still-serving Chancellor and boldly offered to create her portrait for the gallery: “During the 16 years of your term in office, I have worked daily as an artist to find images and language for the questions of our time. It would be a great honor for me to express all of that in a portrait.”

“Art and culture are an important means for future generations to understand the reality of the GDR and the consequences of reunification”

I was born in 1989—still in the GDR. For a long time, I felt somewhat uncomfortable about my East German background; I was proud to speak hardly any dialect and not to be immediately read as an “Ossi.” Henrike’s self-confident handling of her origins in the art world was a role model and motivation for me: until the very end, she insisted on adding “(GDR)” after her birthplace Zwickau. Ever since I first saw that on her website, I have added to my own short biography that I was “born in the GDR eight months before the fall of the Wall.”

Unfortunately, we only met in person a few times. One of the highlights was our visit to the Federal Chancellery. At the initiative of the then Federal Government Commissioner for Eastern Germany, Carsten Schneider, Gitte Zschoch, Secretary General of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, had assembled a group with concentrated East German expertise from the cultural sector to discuss questions of cultural funding. Henrike greatly enjoyed the 1990s building—it was completely her era. We took a group photo with her analog camera right in the foyer. We had fun in front of the Chancellery Gallery. In the scanned photos she sent us a few days later, she stands confidently between Schröder and Kohl. As early as July 22, 2021, she had written a letter to the then still-serving Chancellor and boldly offered to create her portrait for the gallery: “During the 16 years of your term in office, I have worked daily as an artist to find images and language for the questions of our time. It would be a great honor for me to express all of that in a portrait.”

For my generation—and especially for future generations—art and culture are an important means of understanding the reality of the GDR and the consequences of reunification, and of connecting them critically to present-day events. Henrike could do this like no one else. In Chemnitz, a mural by her grandfather still exists today. Karl Heinz Jakob created it in 1960 for the city council of Karl-Marx-Stadt: “The Mechanization of Agriculture,” 11 meters long and 3.8 meters high, concealed behind a drywall partition since 2002. In 2024, she performed the image at the opening of the Pochen Biennale in Chemnitz with a line dance group and street dancers. “My life’s goal is to one day uncover it again,” she said while greeting the guests, as reported by the Der Spiegel. Others will now take up that task.

Sanja Kojić Mladenov on behalf of the EVROVIZION team 

Henrike was an extraordinary artist and a wonderful human being. Losing her leaves an indelible mark on the world of contemporary art and in the hearts of all who knew her. I had the privilege of working closely with her from 2019 onward as part of the ifa exhibition project EVROVIZION. CROSSING STORIES AND SPACES, getting to know her better and deeply appreciating her work. Over the years, our collaboration grew into a deep personal bond. I remember our first meeting in Sarajevo very clearly. Her presence immediately impressed me. With her carefully chosen clothing and deliberately selected brands, she did not seem like someone from the world of fashion, but rather like a consciously constructed persona. I soon realized that nothing about her appearance was accidental. Her hairstyle, her clothes, her metallic shimmering nails, her direct gaze, and her staged poses formed a visual language that functioned as a statement—almost like a uniform that made visible how aesthetics can carry ideological memory. It was never about glamour, but about the power of representation and the political dimension embedded in surface, posture, and appearance.

On our travels together, she was always curious and open-hearted, eager to explore the margins of society and hidden narratives. She was particularly interested in how capitalist products and brands are read and appropriated in different local contexts. That is why she visited flea markets on the outskirts of cities and small craft shops. With great delight, she bought a Marlboro T-shirt in Sarajevo and a Prada replica bag in Tbilisi, which she wore in her performance Foreign Agent—an immediate response to the controversial law in Georgia (critics view the Georgian “foreign agent law” as an attack on press freedom and civil society). She never shied away from critically addressing difficult topics. She was especially interested in the mechanisms of radicalization, which she herself had experienced while growing up in the former GDR amid right-wing extremist youth culture in the 1990s.

I was always moved by the fact that her critical artistic practice was deeply rooted in empathy, sensitivity, and a reflective attitude — an attitude that never sought to hurt, but to understand different perspectives, especially between Eastern and Western cultures. Those of us from Southern and Eastern Europe felt that Henrike was “one of us,” as she met Western privileges with irony. Wherever she went, she carried an anti-colonial spirit within her—not merely as theory, but as a deeply internalized stance and a matter-of-fact kindness. She had the gift of approaching people and spreading joy. She greatly looked forward to her many upcoming projects, especially her participation in the Venice Biennale, and was proud to present her work there.

I vividly remember her joy and sense of fulfillment when she became a mother. She was convinced that the two of us shared a special bond because our daughters were born on the same day, February 13. Henrike Naumann left us on February 14, one day after her daughter’s first birthday—a daughter to whom she passed on her joy and life energy. We will deeply miss her impressively vast knowledge, her honesty, her humor, and her sense of justice. In our memory, she will remain forever.

As the EVROVIZION team, we will always stand by her daughter Nina and her husband Clemens.

With love and remembrance.

The Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) is responsible, as commissioner, for the contribution to the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2025, the curatorial position was determined by an eight-member selection committee. The members were: Johanna Diehl (artist and professor at the Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Würzburg-Schweinfurt), Florian Ebner (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Julia Grosse (curator and cultural manager), Gaby Horn (former Berlin Biennale), Anh-Linh Ngo (Arch+ and the Akademie der Künste Berlin), Angelika Richter (Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee), Stefan Rössel (Auswärtiges Amt) and Gitte Zschoch (ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).

The Biennale in Venice opens on May 9, 2026.