Tumbling Ruins

How Evil Is Architecture?

In Tumbling Ruins, the artist Henrike Naumann and the art historian Angela Schönberger develop a collaborative project that draws discursive connections between Naumann's work Ruinenwert (2019) and Schönberger's research.

Angela Schönberger (b. Kaufbeuren, 1945) wrote her dissertation in the 1970s on the new Reich Chancellery building as a central scene of the Nazis' crimes and on Albert Speer's theory of ruin value, interviewing the architect for her research. After the fall of the Wall, the former managing director of the Internationales Design Zentrum Berlin turned her attention to the structural transformation of the former East Germany and the emergence of new products and designs. Schönberger was director of the Berlin State Museums' Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Decorative Arts, until 2010.

In the early 1990s, the artist Henrike Naumann (b. Zwickau, 1984) witnessed how right-wing extremism became the ascendant ideology among her hometown's youth. Her work reflects on the history of right-wing terrorism in Germany and the widespread acceptance of racist ideas in large segments of the population today. She scrutinizes the mechanisms of radicalization and how they tie in with personal experiences and youth culture. Studying the friction between antagonistic political convictions sparked by the ambivalence of personal aesthetic tastes, Naumann builds immersive installations that combine video and sound with scenographic settings.