Nina Fischer & Maroan El Sani The Beauty of the Imperfect, Impermanent and Incomplete

Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani (b. 1965, 1966, live and work in Berlin and Sapporo) have worked with the media of video and film since beginning their collaboration in 1993. The settings for the Berlin artists’ films and videos are places marked by an architectural utopia or an urbanistic vision. Formerly symbols of social change, they are now often abandoned, partially weathered ruins or unused voids stuck between the past and the future. Fischer & el Sani make fictional actors take possession of these backdrops. They fill the empty utopias with new activities and histories. Filmic reinterpretations of the underlying functional and social concepts arise, with various superimpositions and references from film and art history. The invisible, the uncanny and the question of the materialisation of thoughts, memory and anxieties are central motifs in their work. In the exhibition in Kunsthaus Glarus two video works, photographs and paper cuts are shown.

In their latest work Spelling Dystopia (2008), a 2-channel video installation, Fischer & el Sani examine the Japanese island of Hashima which, because of its history – a rapid rise and sudden decline – has global symbolic power. Originally nothing but a rock in the sea by Nagasaki, from 1887 coal was mined on the island. In 1916 the first reinforced concrete skyscraper in Japan was built there. During World War II it was a work camp for prisoners of war from China and Korea. After the war the small island had the highest population density in the world before being depopulated in 1974 because the mines had been over-exploited. Since then the island has been uninhabited and left to decay. The place is known to a young film and video generation as a ghost island and the bleak location for dystopian science fiction scenarios, such as the film Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000), or from manga, anime and computer games. On a spoken soundtrack the video work links the memories of a former inhabitant of the island with accounts by schoolgirls of the film Battle Royale. For the viewer of the video, reality and fiction merge into complex layers of memory. The overgrown island becomes a screen for the projection of all kinds of stories. Its own historical narrative becomes increasingly blurred.

In the video work The Rise (2007) Nina Fischer & Maroan El Sani engaged, during a stay in Amsterdam, with the new high-rise district of Zuidas (Southern Axis), which is being built along the ring-road to the south of Amsterdam according to classical visions of the modern metropolis. On a fire escape on the office tower of the architect Rafael Viñoly, which is designed as an incision in the façade, and which circles the building in a spiral, a man climbs the building. The protagonist unites all the features of the successful office-worker. He wanders endlessly up the steps. Driven by an aimless ambition and fleeing loneliness, he encounters various obstacles, fearful hallucinations, his own doppelgänger and an imaginary child. Reaching the top, he discovers another doppelgänger in the opposite building and is thrown back to the beginning of the steps, to begin once more his upward flight, the endless loop of his rise. The work picks up references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Piranesi’s architectural fantasies in prints like Carceri d’invenzione (1750-1761). Both of them are symbols of nightmare and labyrinthic horror visions. In the video too there is a noticeable dizziness and loss of control, possible negative aspects of a striving for success. In this way the work becomes readable as a socially and architecturally critical commentary on Amsterdam’s ambitious urban developments.