Now Representing – Saâdane Afif

Saâdane Afif’s installations, objects, concerts, and performances engage with works and events drawn from the histories of art, music, and poetry. His practice is defined by radical variability – indeed, a fluid passage – across media, disciplines, inspirations, and methods.

Afif’s practice draws on a rich network of collaborators from diverse fields, whose expertise and style is absorbed, rearticulated, and set into resonance with his oeuvre. In an ongoing project, Afif invites visual artists, musicians, and writers to produce poetic texts which he coined "lyrics." Playfully testing the boundaries of the conception of the artwork as a discrete, authorial object, Afif’s Lyrics' series invite the viewer into co-authorship, and thus questions our relationship with art as a collective experience.

For another critically acclaimed long-term project, The Fountain Archives, initiated in 2008, Afif systematically gathered magazines, catalogues, and books, that contain reproductions of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917). The project concluded in 2022 with a monumental installation devoted to the iconic readymade. This project exhibits Afif's characteristic skill to bring canonical artworks of art history into new contexts, where they appear in an unexpected light, touched by the artist's wide-ranging knowledge and unparalled sense of humor. 

On the decision to represent Afif in collaboration with Esther Schipper, Mehdi Chouakri noted that, "I began representing Saâdane Afif's work in 2005. Afif's profound knowledge of and broad perspective on conceptual art, as well as the visionary path he has taken with his own work, have been instrumental to my gallery and its focus on neo-conceptual approaches. That is why I am particularly excited that Esther, with whom a long friendship connects me since we both came to Berlin in the mid 1990s, will now collaborate in the representation of his work."

Esther Schipper notes: "I could not be happier to collaborate with my long-time friend Mehdi Chouakri to represent Saâdane Afif whose work I have followed for many years. His current exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is both conceptually rigorous and has an enchanting poetics. It marks an important moment."

Afif's solo exhibition, titled Five Preludes, is currently on view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart through September 13, 2026. Afif is part of the group exhibition Winter 2026, on view at Esther Schipper Berlin from January 20, 2026. In March a solo exhibition entitled Saâdane Afif: Affiches / Plakate will open at the Museum Folkwang in Essen.

Saâdane Afif was born in 1970 in Vendôme, France. Afif received a Master of Fine Arts at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bourges in 1995. The artist lives and works in Berlin.

Afif was awarded numerous grants and residencies, among them: 2020 Villa Aurora Grant Recipients, Pacific Palisades; 2015 Prix Meurice pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris; 2009 Marcel Duchamp Prize, Paris; 2006 Prix International d'Art Contemporain de la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, Monaco; 2002 Prix Villa Medicis Hors les Murs, Glasgow, and artist residency at Villa Arson, Nice, in 2001.

Saâdane Afif was the artistic director of the 4th edition of the Bergen Assembly triennial: Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron (2022). Together with Yasmine d’O., he is the founder of Side Magazine.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Five Preludes, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin (2025); The Pavilion of the Eternity, 15th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2024); The Fountain Archives and Beyond…, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2021); The Fountain Archives, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2019); This is Ornamental, Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna (2018); Paroles, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2018); Ici., Leopold-Hoesch Museum, Düren (2017); Là-bas., La Panacée, Montpellier (2017), The Fountain Archives, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris (2017); Quoi ? – L’Eternité., Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2016); Das Ende der Welt. Kunst/Natur. Artistic Interventions Round I, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Berlin (2015); Là-bas., Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus (2014); Blue Time, Blue Time, Blue Time..., Institut d‘Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, (2013); Anthologie de l’humour noir, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2012), and The Fairytale Recordings, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2011).

His work is held in the following collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France; FRAC Corse, Corte; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon; FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris; FRAC Rhône-Alpes, Villeurbanne; FRAC Centre-Val de Loire, Orléans; FRAC Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Musée Jenisch Vevey, Vevey; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau München, Munich.