Arriving in Germany in 1992, three years after her father found work at a state-run steel mill of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in Freital, Sung Tieu spent hours waiting in immigration offices, the aesthetics of which have remained with her three decades later. Referencing these cold, bureaucratic scenes from her family’s as well as her own memories of navigating two German immigration systems, she complicates Ostalgie (a German neologism that refers to nostalgia for or romanticism of the GDR) by engaging with a rich archive of seemingly trivial practices of governance to unpack their implications for migration and memory in contemporary Germany. She reveals the supposed neutrality, rationality, and objectivity of national bureaucratic systems and aesthetics as constructs that legitimize and uphold specific political narratives. Tieu has described herself as a ‘slow producer’, attributing this to her research-intensive practice that tends to be driven by process rather than results. In a 2021 interview with Guy McKinnon Little, she explains: ‘I don’t want the research to end up in the exhibition in an overly linear way, simply because I don’t think anything is that straightforward. I prefer to walk sideways with the research and to convolute it with other things that have more to do with my own life or my state of being at that moment in time.’ For the exhibition, Tieu brings in her personal footage of the housing complex for former Vietnamese contract workers in East Berlin where she lived with her family, today in ruins and in the hands of new private owners. She also references a series of documents that evidence the attempts of the Stasi to support the creation of a similar state security service in the brother country of Vietnam.

A Secret Stasi For Vietnam commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Sung Tieu and HKW, 2023–24.

Work in the exhibition: One Thousand Times (2023), super 8 film transferred to digital, sound, 8′51″; A Secret Stasi For Vietnam (2023), 21 digital prints on paper, framed, each 32.1 × 23.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist