The Berlin-based artist duo Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani has been collaborating on their interventional and situationist art practice since 1995. Their investigations revolve around moving images as both impartial documents and involved narrations of our changing societies.
The main protagonists of their projects are often urban spaces that bear the burden of collective memory, upon which the forces of historical transition and turmoil have been engraved. The artists’ poetic-filmic and performative investigations of these sites tackle the idea of revisiting blind spots in contemporary society through their artistic reanimation of such places.
With their work Fischer & el Sani focus on transitory spaces and vacuum situations in urban environments, collective memory and vision in various media such as film, video, installation and photography. They critically reflect the rise and fall of modernity, the intense and uncanny relationship between our contemporary society and utopian projects that have driven the evolution of our history, from the past to the future, or the anachronistic merging of both ends. Their work is a permanent pursuit of and negotiation with the transition of time. Fischer & el Sani are interested in exploring the historic traces of urban landmarks, monuments and events that embody such a transition. Several places that were once hallmarks, centers of political culture, avant-garde art, and social developments, have become more or less temporally blind spots in contemporary society. They bring them back to today`s consciousness in their altered, mystified phases: not utopian anymore, not obsolete, but rather not yet redefined.
2007 until 2010 they have been Associate Professors for Media Art at Sapporo City University, Japan. Since 2014, Nina Fischer is Professor for Experimental Film and Media Art at the University of the Arts, Berlin.
Fischer & el Sani have been awarded as Rome Prize Fellows at German
Academy Villa Massimo, were recipients of the Karl-Hofer-Prize of the
University of the Arts, Berlin and received stipends for artist in residence programs at
Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Villa
Kamogawa – Goethe Institute, Kyoto, Villa Aurora, Los Angeles. They won the Short Tiger Award at
the International Film Festival Rotterdam and were a Candidate for the European Short Film Award.
International art exhibitions they have participated in include Sharjah Biennial, 2023, Manifesta 13, Marseille 2020, Videonale, Bonn 2019, Media City Seoul Biennale 2014, 2012, Aichi Triennale 2013, Istanul Biennial 2007, Gwangju Biennale 2008, 2002, 1995, Sydney Biennale 2002, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art 1999, Berlin Biennale 1998.
Solo exhibitions include Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 2021, Edith Russ Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg 2019, Maxxi Museum, Rome 2017, K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf
2016, Museum of Contemporary Art Hiroshima, 2010, Stedelijk Museum Bureau
Amsterdam 2007, Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo 1998