Video Art Programme:  
Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani “Appropriation takes you on a weird ride” 2020

Fischer & el Sani, Appropriation takes you on a weird ride, 2020, 4K Video, 20 min., Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin/Leipzig, © Fischer & el Sani und VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Appropriation takes you on a weird ride investigates the strange German enthusiasm for Native Americans in relation to contemporary racism and its deep colonial roots. This fascination, especially with regard to the construction of a german identity, has a rather frightening than impressive chronology.

It begins with the first-century Germanic Cherusci chieftan Arminius and stretches to the adventure novels of Karl May and the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows in the 1800s, through the ethnographic exhibitions in zoos and circuses and founding of “Indian clubs” at the turn of the twentieth century, onward to the appropriation of Indigenous identities by Nazi ideologists, up until the present day, when new rightwing groups have developed an unsettling identification with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.

Nina Fischer (*1965 in Emden) and Maroan el Sani (*1966 in Duisburg) have been working together since 1993 in film and photography projects that focus primarily on urban spaces and collective memory. As a duo, they have participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Manifesta 13, Marseille 2020, Videonale, Bonn 2019, Media City Seoul Biennale 2014, 2012, Istanbul Biennale 2007, Liverpool Biennale 1999, and the Berlin Biennale 1998. Fischer and el Sani live and work in Berlin.