Nermine El Ansari

Nermine El Ansari is an Egyptian artist, born in France in 1975 and based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She works in installation, video, drawing, photography and performance. Her installations pair sound with moving images or sculpture, and include fragments of structures built from miniature red bricks.

She calls her field "social geography". She returns to "borders, territories, and cartography", actual or imagined, and to the tension between city and nature. Private or chance images lead her to "collective memory". The painting series Constructions (2007 to 2009) took up the red brick of "ashway'iyat", or informal housing. Memory Spring (2018) revisits childhood memory drawings first made during a curfew in Cairo. No Longer (2023), an immersive installation, sets her images, with Tahrir Square footage from 2013, against a poem read by Moneim Rahama and sound by Adam Świtała.

El Ansari studied at Helwan University in Cairo, the Fine Art School of Versailles and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2002). Solo shows include Transit at the Madre Museum, Naples, and Constructions and Hidden Monsters at Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, both in 2009. She held residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008), and Villa Empain, Brussels (2022). In 2021 she co-founded the D.N.A. collective in Reykjavík, and from 2020 to 2023 she sat on the board of The Living Art Museum.