Henrike Naumann: Re-Education – Opening September 22 at SculptureCenter SculptureCenter is pleased to announce “Henrike Naumann: Re-Education,” the first exhibition in the United States by Berlin-based artist Henrike Naumann, on view September 22, 2022 – February 27, 2023. Naumann’s installations of furniture and design objects are composed as scenes that ask pressing and enduring questions: What is the relationship between design and ideology? How should one read the politics of design? At SculptureCenter, Naumann has developed a museum-scaled display of dozens of furnishings and domestic items staged in a critical parody of the dubious “horseshoe theory.” The “horseshoe theory” was developed in Germany in the 1930s and revived in the 1990s both to establish the parameters of the political center and to treat far left and far right extremisms as equivalent threats to its order – as if they were the two ends of a horseshoe bending away from the middle. Naumann’s exhibition rejects such superficial categorizations of centers and extremes through an idiosyncratic survey of rural sensibilities in American interior design. Naumann’s exhibition references two phenomena: first, the deployment of anti-fascist “re-education” programs developed by Allied Forces to reestablish a footing for democracy in West Germany after World War II; and second, the later, implicit, self-“re-education” after 1989 of those living in former socialist states, such as Naumann’s native East Germany. For Naumann’s post-1989 generation, “re-education” happened through an imported, American pop culture and increased consumer agency – in essence, the GDR entering Western history through retail and media. Reframing dormant Cold War-era geopolitical conditions, Naumann’s project opens a new consciousness of how we live among the ruins of twentieth century ideologies — now especially visible to a generation born just as the Cold War drew to a close.