Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau (GDR) in 1984. Until her sudden death in February 2026, she lived and worked in Berlin. Naumann reflects on socio-political problems through design and interiors. She explores the friction between opposing political opinions through the lens of taste and personal everyday aesthetics. In her immersive installations, she arranges furniture and objects to create scenographic spaces in which she integrates video and sound works. Naumann’s artistic practice reflects upon mechanisms of radicalization and their connection to personal experience. It includes a wide range of lectures and interdisciplinary collaborations engaging with the central questions of her work. Most currently, she had been doing research on the relationship between art and war.

Naumann has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship, the Max Pechstein Prize of the City of Zwickau, the Leipziger Volkszeitung Art Prize and the Scholarship of Villa Aurora/Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles. Important exhibitions of her works have been held at the SculptureCenter in New York, the Busch- Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the German Parliament as well as the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti (2015, 2017) and the Kyiv Biennale in Ukraine (2023). Henrike Naumann was a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Program 2024/25. She had accepted a professorship in sculpture at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg beginning in 2026.

From her nomination in May 2025 until her death, Henrike Naumann worked intensively on her contribution to the German Pavilion, completing the work before she passed. The team of the German Pavilion has been working alongside her studio team to bring her artistic vision to life.

Sung Tieu, born in 1987 in Hải Dương, Vietnam, is a Vietnamese-German artist who lives and works in Berlin. Having grown up between political systems, Tieu’s work unfolds at the intersections of biography and geopolitics. Her practice examines the enduring aftershocks of the Cold War, colonial entanglements, and the subtle mechanisms of institutional power. It reflects the social and psychological effects of migration, bureaucracy, and state control. Through sculpture, painting, sound, video, photography, scent, text, and archival material, Tieu constructs spatially dense installations—environments in which political structures and personal experience converge and blur.

Currently, her works are on view as part of the 82nd Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Major solo exhibitions have been held at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Amant Foundation, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Kunst Museum Winterthur; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.); Mudam – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK), Leipzig; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Nottingham Contemporary. She has also participated in the Taipei Biennial (2025), Gwangju Biennale (2024), Shanghai Biennale (2023), Bienal de São Paulo (2021), and Kyiv Biennale (2021). Tieu has received numerous awards, including the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2024), the Rubens Promotional Award of the City of Siegen (2024), and the Audience Award of the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2021).

Kathleen Reinhardt is the director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, that has been awarded as “Museum of the Year 2025” by AICA Germany in the beginning of this year. Her curatorial practice in German as well as international contexts focuses on contemporary art, art in various political systems, and post-socialist practices, as well as the discursive potential of collections in the context of ideology, memory, and identity. She understands the museum as a space for artistic research and production and explores the role of feminist perspectives in reshaping institutional structures.

Reinhardt conducted research and earned her Ph.D. in African American art and socially engaged artistic practices at Freie Universität Berlin in the Department of Global Art Histories. She teaches internationally and publishes in exhibition catalogs, academic anthologies, and scholarly journals, including African Arts, Art Margins, Contemporary Art, and Kaleidoscope.