Henrike Naumann’s newly commissioned installation for the Biennial, Eurotique (2018) is based on the phenomenon of ‚Eiroremonts‘. Latvian for ‚Euro-repair‘. The artist worked with the elements that were used to renovate homes in Latvia in the late 1990s, such as low ceilings with built-in lights, laminate flooring and plasterboard walls. The installation positions itself between museum, store and domestic space. ‘Eiroremonts’ started in the early 1990s, when at first only the more affluent were able to afford it. By the 2000s this style was available to almost everyone, becoming the de facto style for renovating a home or an office intended for sale or rent at a good price. In Latvia in the 1990s, there was a renovation boom, parallel to the privatisation of the communal and the individualisation of the domestic. In 2004 Latvia became part of the EU. Many young Latvians feel that ‘Eiroremonts’ represents a longing for ‘the West’ that their parents felt they needed to accomplish, and a way of dealing with a complicated past and memories by covering them in new walls and furnishings. Did the crisis of 2008, when the ideal of the West started to crumble, mark a turning point in the idealisation of Western living? Why do these interiors make young people today so melancholic? Do ‘Eiroremonts’ represent a future that never came?
Eurotique, 2018
Mixed media installation












Mixed media installation, dimensions variable, installation views RIBOCA1
1st Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art
2 June – 28 October 2018
Riga, Latvia
Henrike Naumann



































Henrike Naumann was born 1984 in Zwickau (GDR). Growing up in Eastern Germany, Naumann experienced extreme-right ideology as a predominant youth culture in the 90s. Her work reflects on the history of the right-wing terrorism in Germany as well as on today‘s broad acceptance of racist ideas. She looks at the mechanisms of radicalization and how they are linked to personal experience and youth culture. Naumann explores the friction of contrary political opinion through the ambivalence of personal aesthetic taste. In her immersive installations she combines video and sound with scenographic spaces. In recent years she widened her focus to the global connectivity of youth cultures and the reversion of cultural othering. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Belvedere 21 in Vienna, Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin, Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach and Galerie Wedding, Berlin, as well as participations at the Busan Biennale (2018), Riga Biennial (2018), Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2018), 4th Ghetto Biennale at Port-Au-Prince (2015), and the 3rd Herbstsalon at Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin (2017).
Henrike Naumann lives and works in Berlin.
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