Growing up in a recently reunified Germany, Henrike Naumann witnessed prevalent transformations in visual tradition, from well-known television programming to the seating from which that programming was eaten. Operating with home furnishings and movie, the Zwickau-born, Berlin-primarily based artist considers how seemingly innocuous aesthetic sensibilities align with and promulgate a host of political ideologies. Her very first US solo exhibition, “Re-Training,” on see from September 22 to February 27 at SculptureCenter in New York, parses parallels between reactionary actions in the United States and Germany as it normally takes a crucial eye to fabulation by style and design.
I Started off OUT carrying out stage and costume structure for theater later, I became a scenographer for movie and television in studios that dated again to the previous German Democratic Republic. Back then, I considered a good deal about how a textual content might be translated into a space, which is akin to my course of action now: I convert looking through and exploration into a set in which the visitor implicitly performs. In 2011, it was learned that the Countrywide Socialist Underground, a white supremacist terror mobile, was dwelling undercover in my hometown of Zwickau whilst murdering immigrants all over Germany. I was checking out my grandmother when NSU members burned down their hideout just a mile absent. These gatherings prompted me to repurpose my talent established to check out the means in which histories of political adjust, and political violence, are documented and reviewed. For the previous decade, I have approached domestic room by means of a documentary format, doing work with furnishings and design and style aesthetics to deal with the social and cultural transformation that accompanied the changeover from socialism to capitalism in East Germany. In the latest yrs, I’ve expanded my observe to take into consideration the Chilly War a lot more globally.
With “Re-Instruction,” I desired to search at the United States from a German perspective, as well as through mediated tv images, simply because that’s what I can communicate to. After German reunification, mass-manufactured copies of postmodern types flooded East German properties people today received rid of their socialist home furniture and purchased these pyramidal cupboards, a political-aesthetic change that stunned and energized me as a baby. At that point, I was also uncovered to American media lifestyle as it filtered in secondhand from West Germany. The Flintstones was the to start with cartoon clearly show that taught me about The united states in the ’90s, however it was essentially created in the early ’60s—television’s Stone Age—in the context of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The display, which some believe that can take position in a postapocalyptic long run, initiatives the American spouse and children unit and American capitalism on to prehistory: no interruption, no Indigenous cultures, just the American way of lifetime perpetually enabled by the exploitation of dinosaur labor. I want viewers to critically think about the factors they’ve grown up with and interrogate aesthetics that may possibly feel amusing, weird, or unserious, but that can also be deeply hazardous.
The events of January 6 made me know that the language I had created to talk about considerably-right radicalization and the fragility of democracy in Germany was relevant to an American context. In 2017, at the Kronprinzenpalais in which the German Reunification Treaty was signed in 1990, I introduced work about the Reichsbürgerbewegung, a revisionist, racist motion on the rise that is predicated on the conspiracy idea that the Federal Republic of Germany is illegitimate: The Reichsbürgers believe that, since a peace treaty was not negotiated right after Globe War II, the German Reich however exists, and understand themselves as men and women beneath risk in an occupied country. Reactionary movements have intriguing aesthetic parallels for example, a Countrywide People’s Military helmet drilled with horns, which I based on a significantly-ideal social media put up from my hometown, inserts this contradictory East German Viking identification development at the web page of a historic break—and is mirrored in the headgear of the spear-carrying Capitol rioter identified as the QAnon Shaman.
On January 6, furniture was made use of as a weapon to split into the Capitol, but it was also the implies by which congresspeople erected barricades to secure on their own. I reached out to the Smithsonian to see if home furnishings from the occasion experienced been preserved, but it looks it’s not considered a historical doc in the identical way that banners, flags, or wrecked artworks are. At SculptureCenter, I developed a monument to the pivotal purpose that Federal-design home furniture, a quintessentially American idiom tailored from neoclassicism, played in this political event. I stacked items of household furniture and armed them with rustic weapons, just about turning these objects into rioters them selves. On the wall on both aspect of the domed installation, I emblazoned the words and phrases “very great men and women on equally sides,” Donald Trump’s assertion about white supremacist rallies and counterprotests in Charlottesville—which anticipated his claims that it was genuinely Antifa that stormed the Capitol.
I’m interested in the influence that “horseshoe idea,” which is a fixture in German media, has experienced on political discourse in the US. The horseshoe metaphor was to start with utilized in 1930s Germany to convey an plan of the political spectrum in which political extremes bend towards just about every other in a horseshoe form, and a “center” balances them out. In the context of wherever I grew up in Germany, the state’s concentration on preventing extremism on the remaining enabled proper-wing terrorism—but the horseshoe type invariably equalizes the much still left and the significantly appropriate, regardless of the diploma of violence made use of or how much culture drifts towards the latter. What have we normalized as “the center” now?
— As informed to Cassie Packard
