In a somewhat unusual move, artist Sung Tieu has agreed to sell the 2025 work Declaration of Donation for €25,000 with proceeds from the sale going to the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin to cover a five-year term for a new board member, curator Mi You, who was nominated by Tieu.
Created for her exhibition “1992, 2025” at KW earlier this year, Declaration of Donation consists of a contract that has been engraved on four mirrors. The contract criticizes KW for charging a €5,000 yearly fee from each of its board members. While the institution has said that those fees are critical to KW’s funding, Tieu argues in the piece that it has limited the diversity of the board “in an era where the legacies of exclusion and economic gatekeeping persist within cultural institutions and beyond,” per the text in the piece.
The work further states that it “operates through institutional logic: a self-reflexive transaction that redirects cultural capital toward structural reform.”
When the work was presented at KW, it hung near a similar piece that memorialized Tieu’s disqualification from a competition to design a memorial for Nguyễn Văn Tú, a Vietnamese person who was murdered by German far-right extremists in 1992 after migrating to East Germany in the ’80s.
You is a curator and a professor of art and economics at the University of Kassel.
“We are grateful to the artist for this provocation and for working with us to realise it,” KW director Emma Enderby said in a statement.
Courtesy the artist and KW Institute of Contemporary Art
