Upon receiving Henrike Naumann’s completely unexpected last goodbye email, which was sent from her own account, announcing her death shortly after it occurred, I was not just utterly devastated about the disappearance of a great artist and dear friend but also immediately concerned about her legacy, which is as immense in its ideas as it is complex in its physical dimension.

Multipart and total installations are notoriously difficult to document and, as a result, to archive or reconstruct. The richness of their parcours is lost to static shots; individual parts are either not given enough attention or idolized through isolation. If an installation was shown in several versions, this creates even more confusion. Henrike’s elaborate political stories told through found or bought furniture and design objects (as well as through films) can be revisited on her website as videos, but even in these versions they are just a shadow of themselves. It is extremely poignant to suddenly see Henrike appear briefly here and there in one of her emblematic curvy mirrors, now no more than a shadow herself.

Her installations are especially precarious to document because they create whole worlds – something I, perhaps idealistically, expect from art. But also because these worlds are truly dialectical, built on contradictions currently considered embarrassing and rather ignored. The world today is extremely polarized and split; this does not, however, help to see it more clearly. Intellectual ventures that cross over self-imposed borders and walls, or, in other words, comparisons of different contexts and historical events, are discouraged – sometimes even legally banned – to allegedly preserve claims of uniqueness. What this situation preserves is a lazy safety of the mind, something Henrike never indulged in. She brought together contexts that did not want to acknowledge each other – like the two Germanys, a party to which she brought Austria as well (in Anschluss ’90, a commission she did with Steirischer Herbst in 2018, which is how we first met) – but soon turned to deeper and even more uncomfortable comparisons. In one of her true masterpieces, Ruinenwert (2019) at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which reconstructed Hitler’s mountain villa through postmodern furniture, she paired “cosmopolitan” minimalist bowls with cartoonishly huge “nationalist” rustic spoons at one of the tables, thus revealing the repressed heritage of today’s taste. That juxtaposition gave me a shudder, the famous “frisson” contemporary art was supposed to be about and which I had not experienced for a long time.

Henrike was much younger than me, but history decided that we would go through our “cultural adolescence” at about the same time, in the nineties – she as a child in the GDR, me as a still-young Soviet art historian making my first steps in the international, read Western, world. This reunification of the two Cold War blocs – more of a reality in Germany, more wishful thinking in Russia – was, of course, de facto a violent neo-capitalist revanche. It included a ruthless process of Westernizing reeducation that taught us, sometimes explicitly, to leave behind everything that did not fit the standard. A consumerist counterrevolution, carried by Western postmodern design objects infiltrating the everyday life of those who could afford them, was at the front line of this battle. As is well known, capitalism won. Philippe Starck’s weapon-like, dangerously sharp, and dangerously desirable citrus reamers or corkscrews are eternal reminders of this battle.

Found furniture in Henrike’s installations often has very sharp angles and metal edges or arms; the objects are latently, and sometimes openly, challenging the owner to suffer sitting on them, or encouraging him or her to be as aggressive as they are. With the wardrobes’ gothic silhouettes or the chairs’ high backrests, they also always make me think of churches. The indoctrination vibe is very much in the air.

As many have remarked, Henrike’s art has nothing to do with Ostalgie (even though she has titled one of her installations after this concept). But the thing is, Ostalgie itself often had nothing to do with being nostalgic about the East: It was a legitimate, although confused and messy, resistance against imposed values. These new values were not about democracy or free speech; they were about the rationalization (and thus, legitimation) of inequality and – strange as it may seem – obedience: the whole notion of “fashionable,” that is, almost obligatory-to-possess, brought in by design. In DDR Noir (2018), Henrike questions values through drastically juxtaposing GDR realist paintings by her grandfather with furniture of “good” postmodern taste, perhaps already available in the GDR or perhaps not, but clearly representing “capitalism.” The paintings are not as ideological as Westerners would expect; they are simple portraits of, one assumes, the artist’s family, painted in a very cautious modern style. What they project is extreme painterly modesty but also a surprising investment in the artist’s gesture, as well as in the human models themselves, and, one can imagine, the audience who might relate to the everyday life represented. None of it is even remotely a part of today’s chic global art, a clear, triumphant winner over modest socialist pictures. High metal chairs add some sort of exclamation point to the story – whether it is funny or sad is for us to decide.

Henrike Naumann was a true historian of our society, and a materialist and dialectical one. I know the dialectical materialism of hers is very much needed today, and I am sure it will live on. It offers many insights into Germany’s political present, including its right-wing backlash as well as its awkward dealing with the past (or failure to deal with it). But curators, or rather, exhibition-makers like myself, have lots to learn from Henrike as well. I felt so connected and close to her and her practice, as my own was going in the same direction. In a time when contemporary art, as I sometimes feel, has completely lost its power and significance and is not needed by anybody but an army of art students, she created works that spoke to everybody, about everybody, and created spaces for thinking and debating. Staying in an inner dialogue with her, I would hope we can continue telling stories with art – stories that are about more than art itself and pay attention to the everyday lives of millions of people. These stories would be analytical but not dry, political but not slogan-like, realistic but also surreal. Henrike’s legacy must live.