Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani

In their most recent body of work, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani document a stripped-down Stedelijk Museum in the midst of renovations and expansion. Taken last March, the ten photographs in the series present various interior spaces within the museum, including the signature entrance hall and grand staircase, emptied of art and visitors alike and reduced to the barest structural forms. Not surprisingly, this results in spaces that look like ruins, an effect similar to that achieved by the artists’ previous documentation of Berlin’s Palast der Republik, the crucial difference being that that structure is currently undergoing demolition. These projects ask how a building wears its history—how its past becomes visible on its physical structure, its pockmarked and worn surfaces an accretion of impacts over time. One of the work’s greatest strengths derives from the unresolved tension between a highly classicized, rationally ordered, single-point-perspectival space dictated by both the camera and the architecture—particularly the Stedelijk’s symmetrical, enfilade layout—and a nagging sense of vertigo prompted by viewing the photographs installed on the white walls of the pristine and equally aestheticized gallery space of Eigen + Art.