Sung Tieu

Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable, 2026

Concrete Projects is proud to support Sung Tieu’s participation in the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.

Sung Tieu envelops the pavilion’s monumental façade, shaped by its National Socialist reconstruction in 1938, in a trompe-l’œil mosaic. The mosaic renders the skeletal remains of a prefabricated apartment block on Gehrenseestrasse in East Berlin – once the artist’s childhood home and one of the largest dormitory complexes for Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR, later inhabited by successive migrant communities, and subsequently caught up in the speculative frenzy of the real estate market, while currently being torn down.

More than three million marble tesserae simulate the surface and fractures of a structure originally conceived as a paradigmatic form of socialist egalitarian housing. Oscillating between illusion and index, Tieu intertwines personal memory with architectural representation, thereby subverting dominant historical narratives. Moreover, the work reveals historical continuities in administrative discipline, surveillance, and marginalisation that have outlived various political systems.

The title “Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable” refers to Article 1 of the German Constitution and translates its principle into an architectural realm of tension. Transposed onto the overdetermined architecture of the German Pavilion, the façade produces a dissonant overlay in which two incompatible systems of representation are held in tension. At the same time, the work embodies a beauty and a longing that undermine the intertwining of architecture with structures of power.