The KW Institute of Up to date Artwork in Berlin has appointed the curator and educational Mi You to its board following the sale of Sung Tieu’s work Declaration of Donation (2025). As per the work’s personal directions, it was offered for €25,000, protecting the price of a five-year time period for You, who was nominated by Tieu to the place.
Tieu’s work consists of a contract engraved onto 4 A4-sized mirrors. It harshly criticises KW’s board construction, which costs a €5,000 yearly charge from every member. The charge is a key income stream for the institute, already beneath stress as Berlin cuts arts funding, but in addition hampers variety within the administration of town’s cultural establishments, wherein “legacies of exclusion and financial gatekeeping” persist.
The contract states how the piece’s sale would leverage funds from the non-public artwork market to diversify KW’s board, declaring that “establishments evolve not by way of declarations of inclusivity however by way of shifts in infrastructure”.
“We’re grateful to Sung for this provocation,” says KW’s director Emma Enderby.
You is a curator and professor of artwork and economics and the College of Kassel. Her curatorial work explores the social, political and financial networks behind artwork.
Tieu, who will symbolize Germany on the 2026 Venice Biennale, created the piece for her exhibition 1992, 2025 at KW earlier this yr, which was curated by Leon Kruijswijk.
It hung alongside related items about Tieu’s exclusion from a memorial design competitors for Nguyễn Văn Tú, a contract employee from Vietnam who got here to East Berlin in 1987 and was murdered by far-right teams in 1992. In 2023, Tieu was invited to take part within the competitors, however after criticising the dearth of involvement of the Vietnamese neighborhood, she was in the end disqualified by the jury by violating the competitors’s phrases—leaving the Vietnamese neighborhood utterly excluded from the method.
Tieu’s follow makes use of archival and textual materials to unpack the place of Vietnamese individuals in Germany, significantly in reference to the GDR, which introduced 60,000 Vietnamese contract staff from “brotherly states” like Vietnam to fill labour shortages, however denied them full rights.
