Kunsthalle Bern presents a new solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Sung Tieu (*1987, Hai Duong, Vietnam). Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, text, video, and sound, Tieu examines the architectures of power embedded within bureaucratic, archival, and institutional frameworks. In exhibition settings, Tieu’s practice often takes on the appearance of a minimalist intervention in the form of a precise aesthetic that destabilizes the spatial, psychological, and perceptual expectations of the viewer.

For her exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Tieu develops a new body of work that traces Switzerland’s historical entanglements with colonial economies, centering on the cultivation of caoutchouc (natural rubber) in French Indochina. The project engages with the legacy of Swiss-born physician and bacteriologist Alexandre Émile Jean Yersin, whose presence in Southeast Asia from 1890 onward exemplifies how scientific knowledge and colonial extraction were co-constitutive.

Tieu translates these historical entanglements into a series of spatial and sculptural propositions that reflect on the exploitation, measurement, and regulation of the human body. The works address how the body – configured as a site of production and discipline — was and continues to be subjected to systems of optimization, control, and instrumentalization.

Using formal restraint to weave together fragmented historical traces, Tieu unearths the enduring infrastructures of colonial legacies and demonstrates how the past-all too often suppressed and forgotten, nevertheless shapes our present. It is a confrontation that creates space for renegotiation.

Sung Tieu (*1987) was born in Hải Dương, Vietnam and grew up in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include presentations at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024), Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2024), Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2023), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2023), Mudam, Luxembourg (2022), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2021), Nottingham Contemporary (2020) and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020). She participated in various international biennials, including the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024), the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023) and the 34th Biennale de São Paulo (2021). Together with fellow artist Henrike Nauman, Sung Tieu will represent Germany at the 61st Venice Biennial in 2026. She is the recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2024, which has been awarded jointly with the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion since 2020.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Shikishima Foundation and Gesellschaft zu Zimmerleuten.