Berit Fischer (PhD) is a transdisciplinary cultural practitioner: an artist, curator, scholar, writer, and an editor. She has been working internationally since 1999. Previously based in New York and London (1997–2009), she now works from Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. from the Winchester School of Art/Southampton University, UK. Her practice based doctoral research asked how curatorial practice can activate spaces and conditions for a micropolitical and holistic making of social empathy as an approach for a post-representational practice. In 2023 she published the practice-based research Towards a Micropolitical and Holistic Post-Representational Practice: A Case Study. It offers a new perspective to the field of contemporary post-representational practice with the specific angle of examining how the curatorial can activate spaces and conditions for a micro-political and holistic making of empathy and offers new terminology, that of “intra-curation” and “affective transformative curation”.
Her research interests include civic engaging, somatic, and listening practices, feminist- and eco-pedagogies, critical spatial practices, and a holistic and experiential knowledge production to permeate the status quo. Her practice often unfolds in forms of affective encounter and relational learning that strives to activate agency and an active micropolitics, fields of action and spaces for critical consciousness raising and engagement. In 2016 she founded the Radical Empathy Lab, an on-going nomadic and artistic social-and research-laboratory for ecological, alternative, and holistic knowledge production.
She is the founder and curator of the socio-ecological festival curriculum (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures at the Floating University in Berlin.
Together with Dr. Thomas Kampe, Dr. Raffaele Rufo and Minou Tsambika Polleros she is the co-founder of the International Forum for Eco-Embodied Arts (Ifeea.earth). An emergent forum that seeks to build sustainable learning communities in response to global ecological crises and the resulting inequalities and uncertainties by creating spaces for gathering, sharing, developing and embodying arts-based eco-oriented knowledges.
She has published articles internationally, and both edited and contributed to the books New Spaces for Negotiating Art (and) Histories in Africa (co-edited with Kerstin Pinther and Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, 2015), Hlysnan: The Notion and Politics of Listening (2014), and Other Possible Worlds – Proposals on this Side of Utopia (2011).
She has given lectures, and workshops around the world, including at New Alphabet School, HKW, Berlin, Making Futures School (raumlabor, UdK Berlin), Bergen University, ZhdK, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Freie Universität Berlin, Winchester School of Art/Southampton University, Nottingham Trent University, and the Soma in Mexico City. She was a member of the advisory board of the B32 project space (Maastricht), contributed and consulted on the Making Futures School (Berlin, 2019), and was a co-founding curator of The Brewster Project (New York, 2001).
She is a curatorial member of the Floating University, and Urbane Praxis e.V. in Berlin (Germany), IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art) and 2018/19 of the Errant Sound working group, Berlin (Germany).
Some of her notable projects have taken place at Floating University, HKW and nGbK (Berlin); Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart); Radical Intention (Italy); tranzit.sk (Bratislava); Casino Luxembourg Forum d’Art Contemporain; Brooklyn Waterfront Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition and Dumbo Arts Festival (New York); Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai; and BankART in Yokohama.
In addition Berit Fischer is a Yoga practitioner since 1999 and received her 200 hours Ashtanga Yoga teaching certification in 2013 through the Ashtanga Studio Berlin (Andrea Lutz) and Manju Pattabhi Jois (oldest son of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, recognized worldwide as the foremost authority on Ashtanga Yoga). She understands Yoga as an ethical, social and political practice, that seeks awareness and connectivity within and around us.
