Ever since encountering La Dame à la Licorne, the sixteenth-century tapestry series at the Musée de Cluny in Paris in 1949, Etel Adnan has been interested in making tapestries. She started producing small drawings, or “drafts”, specifically intended to become larger works, weaved as tapestries or even produced as ceramic murals at a larger scale. In the mid-60s, on her way from the United States to Egypt, she stopped in Tunisia where she met a master weaver and commissioned her very first two tapestries from those drafts. Since the 2010s, Adnan’s tapestries are handwoven in France at Les Ateliers Pinton d’Aubusson (Felletin).

Sung Tieu’s artistic practice examines the tensions between individual lived experiences and the overarching mechanisms of systemic regulation, offering a critical perspective on Germany’s divided history particularly of the 1980 recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This agreement resulted in the migration of around 60,000 Vietnamese contract workers to the GDR during the 1980s. The works shift focus to the far-reaching consequences of the collapse of the GDR, depicting its ongoing impact on the identities, roles and social networks of the Vietnamese community in Germany, often explored through the practice of smuggling. While the various objects on view might at first glance be difficult to identify, they turn out to be products made by Vietnamese contract workers in Germany. The actual objects, which don’t carry any trace of this history, were made by some of the approximately 70,000 workers, who came to the GDR between 1980 and 1989. Like the objects, these workers have been erased from the cultural and social landscape of the time.