Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani are German artists of a younger generation whose work is informed not only by the post-1989 emergence of a "new" Berlin, but also by the removal of remnants of the past in the name of the future. Their large-scale installation, "Palast der Republik" (2001/2002), combines found documentary, live web-cast, video, and a line drawing on foil presents surprising evidence of stasis and suspension hidden within this context of overwhelming acceleration. The Palace of the Republic, located on the Unter den Linden, was built in 1976 on the ruins of an eighteenth century Prussian Imperial Palace. The building, which functioned as the seat of the East German Parliament and a popular meeting place for its citizens, is perhaps the most visible architectural remnant of Berlinﾕs DDR (German Democratic Republic) past. Vacant since early 1990, the interior of the building has been completely gutted due to asbestos removal, while its famous facade remains basically unchanged. After a decade of controversy, the Palace's future remains undecided, and the battle between those who wish to see it remain as a sort of monument (at least symbolically) to the DDR period, and those who demand that the Royal Palace be rebuilt on the site continues.

Fischer & el Sani's Palast der Republik installation returns the sealed interior of the structure to visibility, exposing the abandoned and emptied building. Here documentary and nostalgia collide in a rebellion against the linear time of "reunification" and the reorganization of Berlin's urban terrain in the service of new ideologies of progress. Collapsing the distinctions between past, present, and future, the installation begins with an official DDR television documentary produced for the opening of the Palace (first broadcast in 1976), and a live web-cam image of the building projected via the Deutsches Historisches Museum web site. The image of the Palace's almost unchanged facade is seen on a computer screen, offering viewers who may have no connection to the building
a picture of its current state. By contrast, the official DDR documentary provides interior views of the Grand Foyer, official state reception and meeting areas, cafes, and the bowling alley as a moderator extols the virtues of the space. Fischer & el Sani present the documentary with equal doses of irony and earnestness, since it is in these images alone that we encounter the Palace as it exists in the popular memory of DDR citizens. In addition, a single line drawing executed on foil* and installed on a glass facade (visible from both inside and outside the gallery), also evokes the decor of the Palace's most populist space: the Milk Bar. More stylish and seductive than the other works, Milchbar (2001) is based on interior design sketches and archival photographs.

By contrast, the four photographs in the installation, Palast der Republik: Nord, Sued, Ost, and Westseite, document the shining Belgian bronze glass facade of the Palace from the North, South, East, and West. As if to supply visual evidence of its current state, Fischer & el Sani have simply recorded what can be seen. The patchy scaffolding and various construction vehicles visible in the margins of the photographs only hint that the building is undergoing alterations. The composition of the photographs is unremarkable, even banal. The images function as basic construction documents, a survey of the site as it appears to any casual observer.

Yet two seven-minute videos, Palast der Republik Weissbereich Volkskammer (2001) that the artists filmed with a digital camera in the condemned interior of the Palace destroy our initial impression that this architectural relic of East Berlin, although abandoned, has been left in peace. The videos are projected simultaneously on opposite walls, which creates a sense of disorientation in the viewer as she moves through the artificially constructed space of the images, a feeling that is metaphorically linked to the precarious nakedness of the empty interior. Even if one never entered the Palace of the Republic during the DDR period, the viewer still has access to uncanny emotions the films may engender: the feeling of walking in a tomb; the tentative curiosity of exploring in a forbidden space; the strange stillness of a sealed-off interior; a cold sense of loss and abandonment; a pang of loneliness. The perspective of both films shows the interior of the Palace, but one is focused on the view outside (through the glass facade), the other primarily on the emptiness of the interior rooms. The 2 views are moving parallel,simultaneously, so one can watch the inside and outside at the same time. The camera glides over the interior spaces of the building in a smooth mechanical motion with a tedium that seems to suck in the emptiness of each dark space. The only sounds we occasionally hear are the low din of asbestos removal in a remote part of the building, the quiet footstep of the cameraperson, or the echoing speech of an invisible worker floating down from the floors above.

The perspective of one film is directed outside the Palace facade, through its plastic covered but transparent glass outward toward the Spree River canal, Prussian Imperial buildings, and the newly reconstructed center of Berlin. This is the Berlin of 2001 seen through the distorting haze of the glass, a projection from the past into the now. The survey of the interior culminates as the camera scans layered beams and open corridors, moving
toward a sun-washed floor. This is the eerie image of the asbestos-free "white area" where the great meeting halls of the Parliament are reduced to skeletal columns of exposed beams and concrete foundations, an empty space too powerful a memory to be devoid of meaning. Light streams in through the glass facade, covered from within by thick sheets of semi-opaque plastic. The floor is an undulating sea of uneven concrete, interspersed with steel plates, chemical stains, and watermarks. It is hard not to see this as an image of a phantom, both in terms of the building's literal vacancy, and in the sense that it housed the functions of a state that no longer exists. Here the Palace exists suspended in a vacuum of elemental transition. The multiple temporalities of time and space evoked in Fischer & el Sani's work, particularly in the installation's conflation of past, present, and future, engage with the central debates concerning Germany's unification, and the unfinished process of articulating a shared history.

*The foil used by the artists is a type of transfer material that leaves the shape of the outline drawing on the wall where it is installed. Previous installations of Palast der Republic have included two additional line drawings of the Palaceﾕs Youth-Club and Grand Foyer, and additional decorative elements such as linoleum flooring from the Palace, vases of hyacinths (a feature of the Palace lobby), and the scent of coffee.